Support the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Management Act of 2009

Filed in archive Food Allergies , Information About on March 28, 2009

I received the following from Papoose Publishing by email and thought I would share:

If your child has had an allergic reaction to foods served at school / nursery you could be entitled to make an accident claim. If you care about a child with food allergies will you take a few minutes to help The Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Management Act of 2009 get passed by Congress this year and to ask for more food allergy research funding?

The Act was initially introduced in 2006, but only passed by the House of Representatives (not in the Senate) in 2008, so it was dropped from the agenda.

Good news: On February 23, 2009 it was re-introduced. Please use the web sites below to locate and email your senator(s) and representative(s). Feel free to copy/paste the sample paragraphs below in your email. Also please forward this message to others who care about food allergies, especially in children.

Locate and contact your senator. Locate and contact your representative. And even the President!

Sample paragraphs to copy into your message:

I am writing to express my support for:

1) The passage of the S. 456: Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Management Act of 2009 introduced on February 23, 2009 by Senator Dodd to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

Its purpose is to, "To direct the Secretary of Health and Human Services, in consultation with the Secretary of Education, to develop guidelines to be used on a voluntary basis to develop plans to manage the risk of food allergy and anaphylaxis in schools and early childhood education programs, to establish school-based food allergy management grants, and for other purposes.

2) Increased federal funding for food allergy research from the current requested amount of about $13M to $50M per year, as recommended by the researchers who gathered at Children's Memorial. Dr. Robert Schleimer, chief of the Allergy-Immunology Division at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine stated, "There are enough children [three million] with food allergies to do the thorough research needed to determine not only how many are now affected, but also to find better treatment."

Thank you for considering these requests.

For more information on the Act, check out the full text of S. 456: Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Management Act of 2009.

Photo Credit: Kmccoy w:2004-05-04 via Wikipedia