A 47-year-old New Jersey pilot was confirmed this week as the first person to die from alpha-gal syndrome, a red meat allergy linked to tick bites.
Researchers from the University of Virginia School of Medicine revealed their studies in a specialized journal this Wednesday, after months of investigating the case to determine the cause of death with the support of his family.
Until now, the pilot’s death had been a relative mystery because the autopsies did not indicate that he suffered a heart problem or any other illness that could lead to such a sudden death.
Investigators managed to find the link with the man consuming a hamburger. A few hours later he began to feel sick and around 7:30pm he was found unconscious in a bathroom of his house, surrounded by vomit.
(Global warming would be allowing a type of tick to survive all year to bite)
Analysis of his death found evidence that the pilot had already started to feel somewhat unwell a few weeks earlier also after eating meat, when he was camping with his family. At that time the man had diarrhea, vomiting and stomach pain, which he attributed to possible minor poisoning and therefore chose not to consult a doctor.
“It’s a tragedy that they didn’t consider that it was an episode of anaphylaxis to connect it at that time to meat consumption,” said Thomas Platts-Mills, an allergy expert at the University of Virginia who was part of the team that found that the deceased pilot suffered from alpha-gal syndrome.
Platts-Mills said she learned about the pilot’s case last February along with the new analysis’s co-author, Erin McFeely. McFeely, a pediatrician, knew the deceased man’s family because their daughters went to the same ballet class.
In McFeely’s conversations with the man’s wife, it came to light how he had fallen ill before, so doctors asked the family to perform blood tests on the pilot’s remains.
This is how they discovered that he had had an allergic condition, which the original autopsy had not detected.
“It was at levels that you basically only see in fatal cases of anaphylaxis,” Platts-Mills said.
Blood tests revealed that the man had developed antibodies to a type of sugar called alpha-gal, a clear indication that a tick bite had led him to develop the meat allergy.
Who is in greatest danger?
It’s not that common for someone to die from a food allergy in the United States, according to Dr. Scott Commins, an immunologist and allergist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“They usually only happen in people who have underlying asthma or some other medical condition. It’s like a confluence of factors,” he said.
For example, the allergic reaction can be exacerbated by alcohol consumption or exercise, since this causes the body to absorb more of what is ingested. The investigation indicates that the New Jersey pilot consumed a beer and also exercised on the day of his death.
Another factor is also when the tick bite occurred, as Commins says that if it was recent that could result in the alpha-gal allergy being more pronounced. Conversely, if someone develops the allergy it will not necessarily be for life; In some cases, there may no longer be an antibody reaction within five years, according to Commins.
Alpha-gal allergy can affect anyone who engages in outdoor activities where ticks are present, according to Commins. But a tick bite alone doesn’t mean testing is necessary unless there are allergy symptoms.
“When someone has a bite, it is important to detect if they begin to feel any stomach discomfort or develop itching or hives within three to six hours after eating red meat or some high-fat dairy, such as ice cream or milkshakes,” said the doctor.
Risk from the impacts of global warming
The blood of cows, deer, pigs and goats contains alpha-gal, and when ticks feed on these mammals the sugar remains in their saliva, so it can be transmitted to humans through subsequent bites. The human body detects alpha-gal as something external and unknown, a possible pathogen, which is why it generates antibodies and a possible allergy.
Not all people who have a tick bite develop alpha-gal syndrome, which generates sensitivity to this sugar such that one becomes allergic to consuming red meat. Symptoms include feeling nauseated, stomach pains, diarrhea, or trouble breathing.
In the United States, almost all detected cases of alpha-gal syndrome are due to a specific type of tick, lone star or “lone star tick“, which proliferates in the Northeast, the South and the Midwest of the country.
However, researchers at the University of Virginia have found evidence that in the face of warmer temperatures both the alpha-gal tick and its main vector, white-tailed deer, have migrated to more places.
“That means a larger, larger population of the United States is being exposed to the tick.” lone star”, the researchers wrote in their analysis published Wednesday.
Commins warns that one obstacle to better detecting this problem is that many doctors are unaware of the disease. Only 42% of doctors surveyed in 2023 for a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report said they had heard of alpha-gal syndrome, and 35% said they were unsure how to detect or treat the disease.
