Thanks to one of my readers for passing along the Letters section from the current (March 2008) Harper’s magazine, which features reader letters in response to Meredith Brousard’s “Everyone’s Gone Nuts: The Exaggerated Threat of Food Allergies” from January’s issue. (As of now, the online version of the letters section, and the original article, are both off-limits to non-subscribers, but you can read about the controversy the article inspired when it first appeared here.) You can find the responses on your newsstand now.

A summary: the four letters printed include two from food allergy patients (one outraged by the article and one with severe tree nut allergies who, based on doctors’ shock at the severity of his allergic reactions, suspects Broussard’s premise — that the prevalence of extremely severe allergies is overstated — may be correct) and one by Robert Pacenza, the Executive Director of the Food Allergy Initiative, a nonprofit advocacy group many of you are no doubt well-acquainted with. Pacenza discusses allergy nonprofits’ role in helping patients and their families to live balanced lives: free from both hysteria and from cavalier neglect of their health.

Broussard, the author of the original article, argues that, unlike activities (like driving) that cause a relatively large number of fatalities, food allergies are a disproportionate cause of public hysteria, stating, “All risk is relative, but we tend to overestimate the prevalence of risks we see covered extensively in the press.” And she responds to Pacenza’s letter, stating that “the Food Allergy Initiative spends a great deal of money and time marketing the notion that food allergies are likely to be fatal rather than chronic or manageable,” and questioning, as in the original article, the epidemiological study that estimated at least 150 Americans die every year from allergic reactions from food.

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