People, including beekeepers love to worry about diminishingly improbably
events.  Take for example the ibuprofen flurry lately.  Simple statistics
can be enlightening.  About 1-2 % of  the general public is
hypersensitive (=allergic) and, say, there are 10 million beekeepers
worldwide who get stung and who could or would go to a doctor after an
adverse reaction.  And further assume that 1 out of  10 weird (ie.
unpredicted) reactions seen by doctors get into print as anecdotal
reports.  That would mean that our ibuprofen reactions occur only 1 in
15,000  (10,000,000/.015 = 150,000 'allergic' beekeepers/.1 [only 1 of 10
cases gets reported] = 15,000 'allergic ' beekeepers per ibuprofen
incident).  Seems to me that is a pretty small risk.  Moreover, only
17-20 people die per year in the U.S. of bee stings out of a pool of 5-10
million 'allergic' people (many of whom believe "the next sting will kill
me"), so even if you have an adverse reaction, the risk of death is below
meaningful measurement.  Fascinating, isn't it?  I personally feel the
these new drugs can do wonders for pain and suffering (and are a hell of
a lot safer than steroids) and would hardly let such anecdotal reports
bother me.  If a mechanism for the supposedly correlated effects between
ibuprofen and systemic reaction is demonstrated, I might become a
believer.  Otherwise, I am a great believer in the power of rare  random
effects emerging from a huge population individuals being stung and
taking any given drug.
        If you want a detailed analysis of the medical, statistical, and
psychological aspects of bee stings and allergy see the last chapter
"Allergy to Venomous Insects" in The Hive and the Honey Bee published by
Dadant.  Many beekeepers already have this book, and if not, where else
can one buy 1324 pages of great information for only $36.
 
Justin Schmidt