Toddler With Dairy Allergy Left Fighting For Life After Eating 'Vegan' Pizza

Allergies are a nightmare – something I can attest to from personal experience – and can have potentially fatal consequences depending on the severity.

Food allergies make family meals out to restaurants a bleedin’ minefield! Generally, due to stringent health and safety training, laws, and to prevent litigation, restaurants are super careful about allergens! However, occasionally mistakes are made, which is why it’s very important that parents of children with allergies are familiar with signs of a reaction and carry all medication on them at all times preemptively.

8 year old Zayaan Hussain is an unfortunate example of a family meal going wrong due to an allergy. He was enjoying a Pizza Hut trip with his family in Blackpool, having ordered a ‘dairy free vegan’ pizza – his parents reiterated with the staff twice that the pizza was dairy free – when he suddenly suffered with a severe allergic reaction 10 minutes after eating, indicating he’d been exposed to dairy.

“While I was on the phone Zayaan was violently sick everywhere and when the paramedics arrived his oxygen levels were really low,” his dad said.

“It actually got worse as we got to the hospital. There were talks of him having to be resuscitated.”

Scary stuff!

After being given antihistamines and his inhaler, and then being rushed to hospital to spend 2 days in intensive care, Zayaan is thankfully on the road to recovery.

Zayaan’s dad, Sajid, has spoken to Pizza Hut and Environmental Health to highlight the error, and Pizza Hut have admitted responsibility for the error.

“We are in contact with the family involved and are very sorry for what happened,” a Pizza Hut spokesperson said.

“We realise it was an unacceptable situation and have already completed an internal investigation with the Hut, which found that the wrong pizza was given to the family as a result of human error.

“We will share the full investigation findings with the Hussain family and are taking appropriate action at this restaurant to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”