Love Island star joins calls for allergy tsar

Jack Fowler said he wanted to help people living with allergies

A reality TV star has joined calls for the next UK government to do more to help people with allergies.

Former Love Island contestant Jack Fowler is among those who have signed an open letter from the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation.

The letter called for an allergy tsar to be appointed in order to "prevent more unnecessary deaths".

Fowler said he almost lost his life after unknowingly eating a nut on a flight to Dubai two weeks ago.

He told BBC Essex he was given a chicken curry containing cashew nuts on a flight.

Fowler said he had been reassured it did not contain nuts but within seconds of eating it could not breathe.

He needed oxygen and an EpiPen while on the plane.

Fowler, from Essex, said: "I was now living my worst possible nightmare being 35,000 ft up in the air knowing the real possibility of me dying.

"It was really scary."

Nadim Ednan-Laperouse, one of the founders of the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation, said it was raising a "really important issue on behalf of millions of people in the UK".

Mr Ednan-Laperouse lost his daughter, Nathasha after she had an allergic reaction to a baguette which contained sesame in July 2016.

"The fear of death is so real when you go through this," he said.

"It is a very horrific place to be to realise that you can be gone from this earth within a matter of 10 -15 minutes from a food allergy.

"We are calling on the government to appoint an allergy tsar which is really someone who is paid by the government to look at the way the UK works in looking after allergy services."