Bad Food Allergy Portrayals In Books

I just read Every Soul A Star by Wendy Mass and I really enjoyed it overall - it is an excellent story about three young adolescents and their families.  One thing sort of ruined it for me, though - the dangerously erroneous portrayal of the management of a child with anaphylactic allergies.  

There is a young child in the book who is sent off under the care of an older boy for a bit and the older boy is not informed of the child's allergies.  The child finds licorice and eats it and volunteers to the older boy that he can eat licorice, just not peanuts and fish.  When the little boy's mother hears of this very dangerous behavior, she greets it casually as if just eating some random piece of candy without checking the ingredients when you have deadly peanut allergies is okay - it is not.   When you have dangerous food allergies, it is not okay to eat anything without checking ingredients.  Seriously, people.


Then later, the little boy goes into anaphylactic shock from eating a cookie with nuts in it and must have an epi-pen administered.  Although it was not used promptly because it was not where it was supposed to be and the child already seems to be going into a coma or about to die by the time he gets it, he is immediately fine upon its administration and does not go to the ER but just goes on about his merry business.  This isn't the way it works, people.  While one can hope, it is not a good bet that an epi-pen will be able to make a kid immediately "fine" if his reaction has gone that far - epi-pens need to be used promptly to work like that, and don't always work that way even when they are used promptly.  Furthermore, if you have to use the epi-pen, you have to go to the emergency room.  Period.  No ifs, ands or buts.

So many people refuse to treat serious food allergies with the care that is needed to keep our kids alive, and misinformation like this really doesn't help.  I really think that if an author is writing about a life-threatening condition - fiction or not - they should do the research to get it right.  

Edited to add that I contacted the author about this matter and she seemed sincerely concerned that her research did not yield accurate information and wants to try to fix it.  Yay her!