Grim news for anyone who spends time in the outdoors, per NPR:
Researchers say they believe they've documented the first known death from alpha-gal syndrome — a red meat allergy caused by tick bites.
We reported a few years ago on the rapid spread of alpha-gal syndrome throughout the country:
Though devastating and incredibly inconvenient, alpha-gal syndrome isn't known as a fatal disease, just an awful one.
But that may have changed after researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, identified a case in which "a 47-year-old airplane pilot in New Jersey fell ill four hours after eating a hamburger at a barbecue in 2024:"
The man's son found him unconscious on the floor of a bathroom surrounded by vomit. The man was declared dead at a hospital. The autopsy cited a 'sudden unexplained death.'
A while before he died, he woke up "with abdominal discomfort, writhing in pain" and with diarrhea and vomiting. These are all classic symptoms of alpha-gal, unfortunately.
He may have contracted the syndrome after encountering some tick larva several months earlier:
A blood sample collected after the man's death showed he had an allergic reaction. His wife said that earlier that summer, he had 12 or 13 'chigger,' or tiny mite larvae, bites around his ankles that left itchy, small bumps. But scientists believe those bites were actually from larvae of lone star ticks, which can cause alpha-gal syndrome.
The CDC, meanwhile, says alpha-gal cases have "increased substantially" since 2010. Long concentrated primarily in the South, the nasty syndrome appears to be spreading further away from those environs:
As of 2023, the CDC said at least 100,000 Americans have been given the condition, with some estimates as high as 450,000.
NPR reports on one tick testing laboratory in New York that reported a doubling of tick testing over 2024, along with "a trend of lone star ticks migrating north."
I'll leave ya with this 2017 video of Matthew Liao, a World Economic Forum bioethicist, talking about using the lone star tick to make people allergic to meat:
Possibly we can use human engineering to make it the case that we're intolerant to certain kinds of meat, to certain kinds of bovine proteins. And there's actually analogs of this in life; there's this thing called the lone star Tick where if it bites you you will become allergic to meat ... so that's something that we can do through human engineering, we can possibly address really big world problems through human engineering.
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