US mobile phone subscriptions per 100 people

American mobile subscriptions per hundred people climbing past saturation, American food-allergy hospitalisations climbing alongside. The phone is not allergic to the peanut. The peanut is not interested in the phone. Yet the lines come up together.

US mobile subscriptions per hundred people went from about 50 in 2002 to over 100 today as smartphones became ubiquitous. Food-allergy anaphylaxis hospitalisations climbed steadily across the same window, with allergy-related ER visits roughly tripling, driven by both rising prevalence (especially among children) and improved recognition and reporting of episodes. Two unrelated public-health and consumer-tech curves sharing a window because the same 18 years saw the country both more connected and, for genuinely uncertain reasons, more allergic.

Some trends do not have a tidy cause. The phones explain themselves; the allergies, less so.