Severe food allergy and particularly peanut allergy causes some of the worst kind of symptoms. A person suffering from peanut allergy can become severely dyspnoic and suffer a so-called anaphylactic shock which can result in a drop in blood pressure that can be fatal. Moreover, the amount of allergy-provoking food necessary for inducing these symptoms is amazingly small.
A tragic example of this appeared on Canadian TV on November 26th 2005; a 15-year-old girl suffering from peanut allergy died after having kissed her boyfriend who had eaten a peanut butter sandwich a few hours previously. Although she was injected with adrenalin, her life could not be saved.
Drug allergy from a kiss
A 45-year-old woman consults a medical clinic because of itching and swelling around her mouth after her husband having kissed her.
Four years previously, the woman suffered similar allergic symptoms after having been treated with the antibiotic Bacampicillin.
The women does not take any form of medicine and she has not consumed any new type of food before consulting the medical clinic. Her husband is being treated with Bacampicillin on account of gingivitis and the doctor suspects that it is this antibiotic that is causing the woman's symptoms through his kisses, seeing that the kisses is the only mucosal contact that they have as they use condoms for contraception.
A person with food allergy can very well get allergic symptoms from a kiss if the other person has eaten an allergenic food shortly before. However, no similar case has previously been observed with regards to drugs.
A few months later, the medical team involved made a small, controlled trial. With a few days' interval, the woman's husband was given either Bacampicillin or placebo (non-effective medicine). It turned out that a couple of hours after taking the antibiotic when the medicine had reached a sufficiently high concentration in blood and saliva, the woman would get all the allergy symptoms again after being kissed by her husband. When the husband took placebo tablets, no allergic symptoms appeared.
Reference:
CTV Canada 26.11.05
The Lancet. Letter. 2002; 359: 1700.
A note on kissing
The author Oliver Herford regarded kissing as a clever tool for ending a flow of talk when words have become unnecessary.
Yet, not everywhere in the world do people kiss each other. Among the Chinese, Africans, Mongols, Polynesians, and South American Indians, for example, this form of "vacuum therapy" is not very common. They find it either inappropriate, improvident, unsanitary, or downright dangerous to the soul. However, as our Western influence gains ground, the resistance towards kissing will probably diminish.
