The Lone Star Tick, not named after Texas but for the single white spot on its back, has begun moving in to the Lone Star State along with the alpha-gal syndrome it can cause. This dangerous tick might already be in your state.
What’s a tick got to do with eating? Lot’s, because it’s bite can cause a meat allergy, the alpha-gal syndrome. And for many victims, alpha-gal creates a dairy allergy as well.
Getting a food allergy from a tick bite is strange but very real. Alpha-gal syndrome can cause rashes, hives, low blood pressure, dizziness, nausea and vomiting, sometimes severe, and even anaphylactic shock.
Alpha-gal’s double delay and double avoidance
Alpha-gal is tricky. There is a double delay with the symptoms. The allergy itself can take weeks or months to develop after a tick bite, and the symptoms take two to eight hours to appear after consuming mammalian meat or, for some, dairy.
Once an allergy has developed double avoidance is required. Mammalian products are out of the diet and out of the medicine closet and the wine rack: some pharmaceuticals contain gelatin and some wines are clarified with gelatin. Avoiding a second tick bite is also important. The allergy can subside in some people, and another Lone Star bite can reinforce or reactivate the meat and dairy sensitivity.
450,000 suspected cases
There were over 110,000 suspected alpha-gal cases in the U.S. from 2010 to 2022, but the estimate including unreported cases is 450,000.
The Lone Star Tick has been spreading out of the Upper South with high rates of alpha-gal syndrome in parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, the whole of Delaware, and hot spots as far north as Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts and northern Minnesota. The Pacific Coast states have diagnosed cases extending inland to most of Arizona. There are no states that are entirely alpha-gal free. And in Texas, the Lone Star coast up to Oklahoma is encountering more Lone Star ticks.
If you have it
A lot of care providers are not yet familiar with alpha-gal, so be informed. If you contract symptoms an allergist may be needed to help with the diagnosis. You’ll likely want to get an epi pen to have on hand. An allergist doing food challenge testing on 250 patients who ate pork sausages or a similar meat to see if it provoked a reaction, found 15 to 20% of the patients needed an epi pen rescue. No one in my family has alpha-gal that I know of, but I will be traveling with the antihistamine Benadryl from now on, just in case symptoms appear at a time when getting to a pharmacy or doctor is not convenient.
If you have the syndrome, the Pill Clarity website lists animal free pharmaceuticals and the FIG (Food Is Good) app scans product barcodes against its database to provide go/no-go information for your dietary restrictions, including alpha-gal. On Martha’s Vineyard, many restaurants now list their alpha-gal safe dishes and some food products on the store shelves there and in some other hot spots are labeled as alpha-gal friendly. You can buy organic wine to be sure gelatin wasn’t used for clarification.
Proposed legislation before Congress
The Alpha-gal Allergen Inclusion Act has been introduced in the House of Representatives. The bill would add alpha-gal to the list of major food allergens and require package labeling. An excellent website covering all things alpha-gal is alphagalinformation.org.
It’s a Lone Star! Run?
Unlike most ticks, including the deer tick plaguing the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Upper Midwest with Lyme disease, the Lone Star tick does not wait passively to be brushed by a passing animal. The Lone Star detects movement vibrations and carbon dioxide from breathing and moves fast towards its victims, aggressively climbing boots and clothing.
What to do if you are a nature lover or work in a vegetated area? Take maximum tick protection measures. Here is an, er, fascinating video from an entomologist. She uses double-stick carpet tape on her boot, DEET, and permethrin-treated clothing to stop an alarming swarm of Lone Star nymphs climbing up her boot. This video was not staged.
By the way, the Lone Star tick not only can confer a nasty food allergy on its victim. It is also host at times to a bunch of other pathogens, including those causing tularemia and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
Why the name “alpha-gal”?
All mammals except humans and a few primates make a form of galactose sugar which is a little different from the galactose we humans produce when we break down lactose from milk in our small intestine. This mammalian alpha-galactose is also found in the salivary glands of Lone Star and many other ticks around the world, causing an eventual immune reaction to mammal food products in many humans they bite.
Thank you for reading. Please support my work by subscribing, if you haven’t, and with your likes, comments, and shares.
