How Do Ticks Cause Meat Allergies?

You can contract an allergy to red meat from a tick bite thanks to a compound called alpha-gal. Learn how it works in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://health.howstuffworks.com/diseases-conditions/allergies/food-allergy/dairy-eggs-meat/meat-allergy-lone-star-tick.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio Hey
brain Stuff Lauren Bogelbaum. Here the food allergies are a bummer,
but for meat lovers, Alpha gal syndrome, also called mammalian
meat allergy, is something of a tragedy. Alpha gal is
the name of a sugar molecule found in most mammals,

(00:23):
but not in humans and not in fish, birds, or reptiles.
The scientists in the United States first began seeing allergic
reactions to red meat in the nineteen nineties, which they
traced specifically to alpha gal. By two thousand six, cases
have been confirmed in thirty nine States, and we're also
popping up in Australia. Alpha gal syndrome causes a mild

(00:47):
too severe allergy to the meat of mammals such as cows, pigs, sheep, rabbits, deer,
and others, as well as mammal products like gelatine and dairy.
Its symptoms include a lot of the usual allergy symptoms, hives, running, nose,
nausea and vomiting, a swelling of the eyelids, lips, throat,
and tongue, shortness of breath, and possibly anaphylaxis, which is

(01:10):
a severe body wide allergic reaction. But people don't just
come down with alpha gal syndrome for no reason. It's
just the most recently discovered in dignity, brought on by
the arachnid that seems to ruin everything it touches, the tick.
It took scientists a few years to discover how exactly

(01:31):
people were becoming allergic to meet but by two thousand
nine they've narrowed the cause down to the bite of
the lone startick, discovered by a scientist who noticed that
the map of the cases of alpha gal allergy overlapped
almost perfectly with the distribution of the tick, which lives
in much of the eastern US and Mexico. A lone
star ticks look very much like any other North American tick,

(01:54):
except the females have a white spot is sometimes shaped
a bit like a star on their backs. In Australia,
alpha GL sensitivity has been linked to the hard bodied
paralysis tick. Both ticks probably pick up the alpha gal
when they consume the blood of those other mammals that
have it, like cows or sheep. In order to develop

(02:15):
a sensitivity to alpha gal, a tick must attach to
you only long enough to leave a bite mark and
inject alpha gal into the skin. After that, your immune
system takes over and destroys the invasive sugar molecules, which
is all well and good, except that your immune system
then remembers those molecules as being potentially harmful invaders. So

(02:35):
the next time that you have a nice steak for dinner,
your immune system may clock the alpha gel that you
ingested and release antibodies that trigger the release of histamines
to fight off the sugar, which it doesn't understand is harmless.
One unusual thing about an alpha gel allergy is that
the allergic reaction might not pick in for three to

(02:56):
four hours after eating red meat, so it can be
one of the more difficult allergies to trace to the source.
As always with tick born conditions, prevention is the best
policy if you're going outdoors in a place where ticks
are known to live, and especially into what an area
is there where long sleeved shirts and pants and apply
insect repellent. Today's episode is based on the article Alpa

(03:23):
gal syndro the meat allergy Caused by a tick on
houseworks dot com, written by Jesselyn Shield. The brain stuff
is production of by heart radio in partnership with ustaf
works dot com, and it's produced by Tyler Clang. For
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