Beware the Lone Star Tick

The tick Amblyomma americanum (Lone Star tick) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

..If you live in the southeastern United States and have been outside, you have been exposed to the Lone Star tick.   This little creature is capable of real mayhem in terms of human and animal health and should be fastidiously avoided!  If you work or play in the woods, you are open to a host of diseases and conditions carried by this one animal.

One of those conditions is Alpha-GAL allergy.  This is not a well known allergy even among allergists and if you have the signs, you may have to insist that your doctor actually take you seriously. Doctors and allergists are just now waking up to the fact that this is a real life threatening situation because the body's reaction to it is anaphylaxis.

Here's a scenario:  You come home from a day in the woods with an itchy spot somewhere on your body and upon close examination you find that there is a little dot that upon even closer examination is a tick that looks something like the illustration.  No matter, you pluck it off and write it up to not using an insect repellent.

A couple of weeks later you have a big steak with all the trimmings for dinner and go to bed happy as a lark.  At 2:00 a.m. you are awakened by a persistent itch in your armpits or around your waistline.  You also have diarrhea.  When you turn the bathroom light on you notice that you have red patches all over your body and all of them are beginning to itch like crazy.  They look something like this....

From Google Images - Health-Tap

My friend you are in anaphylactic shock.  You are having a life threatening episode and my doctor tells me that when this happens I should chew a couple of benadryl, administer an epi-pen and head for the nearest emergency room.

What is it? What do a tick bite, a steak (or a hamburger or whatever meat you ate) have to do with anaphylaxis?  Your tick bite may have injected you with an enzyme that makes you react this way  to eating meat.  Make an appointment, wrestle your non-believing doctor to the mat and insist on a Beef AB.IGE blood test. You might as well ask for a similar test to pork as well.  You may even show an allergy to gelatins at this point.

If you are right and test positive, the only answer at this point that I know of is to totally abstain from consuming any mammal meat. That includes any beef or pork or even llama - any animal except fish and poultry (and perhaps kangaroo...)  I'm sorry but that's it.

Here are some good sites for reading up on this for your own research.  And remember - Eat more Poultry...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha-gal_allergy
http://alpha-gal.org/
http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/20/health/meat-tick-bite-allergy/

And a host of other sites you can see by googling alpha-gal.