An average of 10 people die from food allergies in Britain every year. Some of these deaths are the result of a confusion between allergy and food intolerance - a ubiquitous, but not serious, complaint. As Thomas Stuttaford writes in these pages, this lack of understanding has resulted in allergy being "ignored or belittled, sometimes with tragic results". The good news is that scientists are close to developing a test which food manufacturers can use to identify any traces of peanut in food - one of the most common causes of fatal anaphylactic shock. And with a tripling of the proportion of children testing positive for peanut allergy since 1989, this is welcome news for all of us.