NEW YORK — The researchers said they believe this is the first documented death from a meat allergy that can be caused by tick bites.
A 47-year-old New Jersey man died last year from alpha-gal syndrome, which was first linked in 2011 lone star tick bites.
According to data, since 2010, more than 100,000 people in the United States have developed a red meat allergy due to this syndrome. one score.
Some outside experts said this appears to be the first documented case of a person having a fatal alpha-gal reaction shortly after eating meat.
“There may have been other deaths, but they were thought to be due to other causes and were not thoroughly investigated like this one,” said Joshua Benoit, a tick biologist at the University of Cincinnati.
A spokesperson for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the agency was not involved in that investigation and could not say definitively whether this was the first such death. The CDC recently published free online training module to raise awareness and improve diagnosis, she added.
Dr. Scott Commins, a leading researcher on alpha-gal syndrome at the University of North Carolina, called the death “a clear tragedy.”
“Completely unnecessary and with increased awareness this will not happen again,” he said in an email.
case report was published this week in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. The lead author was Dr. Thomas Platts-Mills of the University of Virginia, who in 2011 led the study that first linked Lone Star tick bites to meat allergies.
People with alpha gal syndrome may experience symptoms such as hives, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, severe abdominal pain, difficulty breathing, dizziness, and swelling of the lips, throat, tongue, or eyelids. Unlike some other food allergies, which occur soon after eating, these reactions usually take several hours to appear.
A new report tells the story of a healthy airline pilot who went camping with his wife and children in the summer of 2024. For late dinner they had steak. This was unusual – the man rarely ate meat.
He woke up at 2 a.m. with severe abdominal pain, diarrhea and vomiting. He gradually got better, went back to sleep, and the next morning felt well enough to eat breakfast and walk 5 miles.
Two weeks later, back home in New Jersey, he went to a barbecue and ate a hamburger. After about four hours he became ill. Soon after, his son found him unconscious on the bathroom floor. The son called an ambulance, but the man was pronounced dead at the hospital that night.
The researchers said blood tests showed signs of alpha-gal syndrome. Evidence that it originated from the Lone Star mite is incomplete. The authors made the connection based on a statement from the man's wife, who said he received 12 or 13 “chigger” bites around his ankle earlier in the summer.
But the finding makes sense because people in the eastern U.S. sometimes confuse tick bites with tick larval bites, Commins said.
The number of cases of Alpha Gal syndrome is increasing due to a number of causes, including the Lone Star tick. range extensionMore and more people are coming into contact with ticks, and more and more doctors are learning about it and ordering tests.
Infected people may take several weeks or more to develop the syndrome, named for the alpha-gal carbohydrate found in tick saliva. Initial reactions to red meat may be mild but gradually become more severe, Benoit says.
Some patients experience only stomach symptoms, and the American Gastroenterological Association has advised people with unexplained diarrhea, nausea and abdominal pain to be tested for the syndrome.
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