Granted you don’t want to take the risk of this happening while you are on a plane and far from medical help, can I ask how much you worry about this incident happening in other walks of life, such as a restaurant or a bus? Because if it’s as you describe, your life must be practically unliveable. Or are we talking ourselves into increasingly abstract scenarios just because it’s a plane?

How about even just someone in your seat on the flight before you, on a short turnaround trip, having eaten nuts, rather than someone 10 rows back on the same one? If you don’t want to entrust your life to a moist towelette, do you trust BA seat cleaning more (and what do you use to wipe down surfaces at your seat?)

Being 30,000 ft up obviously affects the consequences if something does happen, but I’m not clear that something like this could, or ever does, realistically happen at all by the sort of casual hand-to-surface-to-hand contact described (as opposed to being given a contaminated meal), even on the ground. But I may be missing something.

And if it is a risk, then presumably it would make sense for you to have a strict no-touch rule for your own food in any public place (cutlery or chopsticks rather than sandwiches and handheld snacks), whether flying or not. Otherwise you can’t even touch a stair bannister in a restaurant on the way back to your table from the loo.

And yes I know you can get an ambulance in an instant on the ground. Have you ever had to, due to someone else’s meal in the same room or a passing nut-eater touching your chair?

To be fair, the earlier example of cabin crew picking up a nut packet during clearing and then handing out food to an allergy sufferer might be a better example than someone’s hand brushing a seat.

But a better answer to this might be the Wagamama approach and have the CSD be solely responsible so that they can supervise meal choice and look after their own hand hygiene.

What are the flight details please and I will check the menu?

sharplea, other than pine nuts in the pesto sauce ex LHR we do not serve any nuts on your flight in the World Traveller cabin, ask to preboarded so that you can wipe around your seat area.
When you board tell the crew and they will make an announcement to customers in your cabin asking them to refrain for eating and nut based products that they may have brought onboard.

was on a qantas flight yesterday where either the wrong meals or the wrong load sheet for the meals was supplied- nothing matched what was supposed to be on the trolley and of course the meals were just labelled with coloured foil rather than ingredients so I can definitely see this happening!

I’m afraid this isn’t making much sense. You never react to dropped crumbs and casual contact in normal life and see no need to take precautions about what gets on your hands (because, essentially, it’s a scenario that never happens), but as soon as you get on a plane it’s a big worry because if it DID happen (even though it never does) then it would be really bad?

This seems like mixing up cause and effect on the one hand, and consequence on the other. I have never been accidentally stabbed in the eye with a biro by a clumsy waiter on the ground, but if it happened on a plane I’d be in big trouble. This doesn’t mean I need to be specifically worried about pens on planes - accidental eye-stabbing is still something that doesn’t actually happen.

Don’t get me wrong - taking great care over your own meal is obviously right and should be respected. But the argument for why nobody on the plane should touch a nut in case they brush your armrest (even though the previous person in your seat may easily have been stuffing himself with the things an hour previously, and you have never reacted to any such scenario at ground level let alone any altitude) is looking increasingly flakey, if you don’t mind me saying so.

The “I don’t worry because there’s always an ambulance” factor is flakey too. Ambulance response tiles vary from 7 min to 45 min even on emergency calls. This does rather suggest that the reason you have never learned to worry about your hand touching a random dropped particle from someone’s hands as they pass your seat, may be because there is nothing to worry about (on this particular, hand contact front I mean)