About 30 percent of nursery schools surveyed said they sometimes gave the wrong types of food to children with food allergies in fiscal 2015, a government survey said Tuesday, highlighting the need to increase staff to prevent such incidents.
The health ministry survey found that at 4,138 facilities, either incorrect food was served, or children consumed food served to others that was not appropriate for themselves. Of those facilities, 1,589 of them saw children develop allergic reactions after the incidents.
The survey covered roughly 33,000 day care centers nationwide. The preliminary results were based on some 14,000 who had responded by early March, the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry said.
Joji Yoshizawa, a pediatric surgeon at Jikei University who was in charge of the survey, said food allergies are more common among younger children and require staff to monitor them so they do not eat certain items meant for others.
A total of 654 day care centers said they had experienced children coming down severe allergic reactions, or anaphylaxis, with 31 saying they could not respond to the situation fast enough.
In some cases, children were found to experience food allergies for the first time.
A total of 1,737 children who were previously found to have no allergies at all developed them at the centers, while 385 other children who already had allergies developed additional ones after eating new foods.
Of some 51,000 children with food allergies covered by the survey, about 4,000, or 8 percent, experienced allergic reactions at day care centers.
While the percentage of children with food allergies stood at 4.1 percent in the survey, the figures varied by age.
It said 7.2 percent of 1-year-olds and 6.5 percent of those under 1 had allergies, while comparable figures were sharply lower among 6-year-olds, at 0.9 percent, and 5-year-olds, at 2.3 percent.