Weird news: click on website or retype link below. Now I've heard everything. Then again, I had a vet who didn't believe in Lyme disease 20 years ago. HAD.
Red Meat Allergy Likely Caused by Tick Bites
BY GRETCHEN GOETZ | JUNE 26, 2012
A few years ago, doctors in the southern United States started noticing an odd phenomenon: people were becoming allergic to red meat, seemingly out of the blue. What in the environment was causing this response? The answer, surprisingly, turned out to be ticks.
The researchers who figured this out came upon the answer serendipitously. Thomas Platts-Mills and his colleagues had been studying a cancer drug called Erbitux that was causing severe allergic reactions in patients – but only in southern states. The team had concluded that these people were carrying an antibody that responded to sugars in the drug.
In their findings – published in 2008 – the researchers noted that the sugars in Erbitux, which is derived from mouse cells, are also present in beef, pork and cow milk.
So the following year when it came to light that otherwise healthy people were developing meat allergies – also in the South – the team began testing samples of their blood and found that they possessed the same Immunoglobulin E (IgE) antibodies as the cancer patients who had reacted to Erbitux.
Since people were reporting a 3-5 hour delay between ingesting meat and having a reaction, scientists guessed that the sugars triggering the response were stored in the fat of the animal, which takes longer to digest than protein or carbohydrates. That would explain why the reaction wasn’t immediate like most other food allergies.
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Then, in August of 2009, the answer quite literally came to Platts-Mills when his own IgE to alpha-gal levels suddenly spiked days after he was bitten repeatedly by ticks while on a hike in the woods.
Out of curiosity, the researchers began asking patients if they had been bitten by ticks before their meat allergy developed.
“Once we opened up that line of questioning, it just blew up on us,” Commins told Food Safety News.
Of the over 1,500 people who have now reported meat allergies to the researchers, at least 90 percent say they were bitten by ticks in the weeks preceding their allergic reaction, he says.
While cases are mostly concentrated in the South in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia, allergy clusters have also cropped up in Pennsylvania and the East Hamptons in New York, says Commins.
The challenge the team faces now is figuring out why this tick – called the “lone star tick” because of a small white mark on its back – is producing an immune response to alpha-gal in humans. . . .
