10 ms·

Cracking the meat-allergy mystery with the tick-bite link

123 points by sohkamyung 6y ago

vslira 6y ago
So you can be literally infected with vegetarianism now? (brb writing a novel about a secret agent trying to stop a terrorist vegan organization from putting this in the water supply of new york city.)
- masonhensley 6y ago
  Yep - this happened to a family member about 9 months ago. Wasn't as straight forward as you might think to diagnose.
  - bobo_legos 6y ago
    This seems to be the story with a lot of tick related illness. People come down with some random illness and they see doctor after doctor who runs a battery of tests that yield no results. Finally someone decides to run the test for Lyme Disease and lo and behold the results come back positive. Kris Kristofferson is a prime example. His doctors thought his memory loss was due to dementia, until a someone finally decided to test for Lyme Disease. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kris-kristofferson-misdiagnosed-alzheimers-has-lyme-disease/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kris-kristofferson-misdiagnosed...
    - KozmoNau7 6y ago
      A childhood friend of my sister was always shorter and skinnier than her classmates, didn't really hit the same kind of growth spurt as they did. I think she also had some indicators of ADHD, and she did run out of energy rather quickly. It turned out after quite some time that she had lyme disease, and once that was treated, she basically hit her growth spurt with back interest. It was honestly surprisingly how much of a change it made. She grew much taller, and now has a very active career as a musician and social activist, barely ever sitting still for very long.
- syntheticnature 6y ago
  Not true vegetarianism; just can't eat mammal-derived meat. Other animals are still fair game. (pun not intended, but I'll take it)
  - justusthane 6y ago
    Primates are also fair game.
    - folli 6y ago
      Chicken might be an easier obtainable answer.
    - nicoburns 6y ago
      Primates are mammals...
      - echelon 6y ago
        > Primates are mammals... That don't produce alpha-gal, the glycan that generates this allergy. If humans produced alpha-gal, negative selection would typically remove it as a possible ligand, and this would rarely happen.
        nicoburns 6y ago
        Ah, gotcha. Well I won't be eating any primates, but that's interesting to know.
        echelon 6y ago
        Biology is such a fascinating field. You've got bizarre disease states, immunobiology (a vast field in its own right - B cells, immunoglobulins, antigens, amplification, negative selection, etc.), evolution, and even ecology. Just in this one problem.
- okprod 6y ago
  Is the sequel to that novel a story about women taking over the tech sector
- rozab 6y ago
  That is... a surprisingly interesting idea. Maybe swap terrorists for a certain nationalist government aligned with a certain vegetarian-leaning religion?
  - ky3 6y ago
    Don't have a dog in this race, but doesn't that certain vegetarian-leaning religion also prohibit violence against human beings? How do the terrorists square such contradictions in their mind? And is that one of the many mysteries driving the narrative in GP's novel forward?
    - SiempreViernes 6y ago
      You'll not be surprised to hear that religions all have "national security exceptions" to their non-violence clauses. I offer as evidence: all the crazy religiously motivated violence perpetuated by any long living religions (the truly peaceful ones being beaten to death long ago).
- sannee 6y ago
  This was apparently one of the story points in Fish to Mars by Peter Watts ( https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8217 https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8217 ).
stuff4ben 6y ago
I wish they'd have gone into the research being done to combat alpha-gal meat allergies. Living in NC and loving meat, this concerns me.
- metiscus 6y ago
  Given that there are only 5000ish cases in a country of 300+ million, right now your odds are pretty good. Best to take precautions when you are in the woods because ticks have other nasty things they bring along which are also quite bad. Treat outer garments, ground cloths, packs, and tents with Permethrin. Wear a DEET based insect repellent. Wear long sleeves and long pants to prevent tick attachment. When in the woods check yourself daily and remove any ticks that you find as soon as practicable. If you are with someone else, check each other as ticks most often attach in places that are warm e.g. skin folds and it is difficult to check all of your own without assistance. Use a smartphone camera if you are alone. Most of my familiarity comes from Lyme disease but ticks that are removed within 12-24 hours are much less likely to spread Lyme disease. It is likely, but I do not have evidence to support this, that a similar fact is true for meat allergies.
justusthane 6y ago
My mom's own experience is remarkably similar to this: repeated unexplained allergic reactions landing her in the ER, eventually blaming an additive in the meat after realizing that meat seemed to be the culprit, and finally a chance conversation with a paramedic leading to the actual cause: alpha-gal allergy caused by a lone star tick bite several years before. Except she lives in Wisconsin, not Australia.
- atwebb 6y ago
  Happened to me as well (Tennessee), was really, really surprising and the reaction seemed to be mainly around less cooked meat. I stopped eating beef and most pork for a few years and then slowly reintroduced it, now there is no issue. This was about 10 years ago and lasted around 5 years.
  - justusthane 6y ago
    Ah, that’s funny! We had traveled to TN somewhere around ten years ago, and assume that’s where she was bit. The lone star tick has apparently made it as far north as Wisconsin though. Glad you’re over it now. My mom recently has had very small amounts of meat products without issue.
  - knaq 6y ago
    Meat is hypo-allergic and free of prions if you cook it enough. It should be black in the middle, white on the outside.
linuxftw 6y ago
I personally know multiple people that became intolerant to beef after a tick bite, rather than all mammalian meat. The symptoms manifested as digestive stress: abdominal cramping, nausea, and diarrhea. The onset of symptoms might be delayed for minutes or hours. In one case, the person started to lose ability to tolerate a wide variety of foods. Further investigation revealed some symptoms that seemed to be related to MTHFR mutations. Genetic analysis confirmed this. Prior to analysis, began supplementing with 5-methyltetrahydrofolate. This began to immediately improve symptoms and foods were able to be added back to the diet. This continue for some time and hit a wall. Eventually traditional Chinese medicine doctor prescribed some herbal supplements. The person in question still avoids beef, but is otherwise back to their pre-tickbite diet and living a normal life after years of struggling.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Bjartr 6y ago
  So was it beef sensitivity or just a folate deficiency?
  - linuxftw 6y ago
    Something about the beef sensitivity (possibly caused by a confirmed tick bite) seemed to cause the situation to spiral into more food intolerances. Symptoms started to mimic others with an MTHFR mutation. That mutation results in less production of some enzyme that metabolizes folate into another form (eventually leading to the form I posted 5-something-or-other). Taking that supplement allows you to bypass the folate conversion metabolic pathway. How does this all fit together? I'm not entirely sure, this is an emerging area of research, I can only share what worked for the person I know. This MTHFR business seems to be related to histamine levels as well, that methlylated folate seems to be used by the liver to metabolize histamine. This seems to be directly related to allergic immune responses. Hypothesis: Most people can tolerate the small amount of immune response triggered by the a-gal protein. People with MTHFR mutations cannot. The exact causative pathway, TBD.
hirenj 6y ago
This is, like so many other stories, another glycobiology story in disguise! I had a great discussion with one of our collaborators about where we thought the alpha-Gal came from that is so antigenic. Our rough hypothesis was that this is a microbiome related problem, and there’s now some kind of bacteria (or something else!) resident to ticks that produces this sugar. My bet is that the little beastie that produces this epitope has adapted to produce alpha-Gal to avoid detection by the immune system in other mammalian hosts. The tick is simply a delivery mechanism for the alpha-gal producing organism. Here’s the thing though - I don’t quite get why we don’t know what is going on yet. We (probably) have genomes for the ticks, and we can guess (sort of ok) what sugars they can make. We can also do microbiomes to figure out which possible beasties are found in the saliva. I must be missing something big so as to explain why we’re not much closer to answers?
- newdude116 6y ago
  "We can also do microbiomes to figure out which possible beasties are found in the saliva. " Good luck with that.
  - hirenj 6y ago
    Ha, yes okay maybe just from their secretions may be a tad optimistic. However, there are some papers out there about the associated microbiota, although I have no idea if they just mushed the whole tick up to get enough material.
    - newdude116 6y ago
      To give you an idea: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1279316/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1279316/ "We are grossly ignorant of bacterial life on earth. Environmental microbiologists estimate that less than 2% of bacteria can be cultured in the laboratory. "
  - centimeter 6y ago
    In the last 2-3 years, several sequencing labs have popped up that specialize in separating pathogen DNA from host DNA. Presumably someone like the UCSF next-gen diagnostics lab could grind up a bunch of ticks and isolate the different DNA sources. They've done similar things with other animal pathogens.
rntksi 6y ago
I have red meat allergy (specifically stronger for beef). IgE present for that specific test and all. I've always thought allergic people were over-reacting. I've never had any kind of allergies before, but when I grew up and travelled, I found out that I had this particular nasty reaction with my nose. At first I thought it was pollen allergy. Now I understand more about allergies. This type of allergy has very little scientific materials to read about so I appreciate OP's link. I just want to know more about it: what made me turn from non-allergic to very-allergic suddenly? And why beef?
- tt433 6y ago
  Allergies are very strange. The skin in my mouth falls off when I eat beans, and there is very little literature about that one either.
  - FeistySkink 6y ago
    I have the same reaction to some spice (plus tongue blood blisters) and I cannot figure out which. Usually it's some poor-quality take away.
    - vorpalhex 6y ago
      Sichuan Peppercorns[1] possibly? They're not used typically in Western cuisine even as a flavor enhancer, but they would appear in more authentic Eastern takeout and they have some weird chemistry going on with tongues. [1]: https://www.thespruceeats.com/sichuan-peppercorn-info-694248 https://www.thespruceeats.com/sichuan-peppercorn-info-694248
      - FeistySkink 6y ago
        Could be, as I had it from some Asian takeaway. But I also get it from some cheap pizza.
  - rntksi 6y ago
    Its strangeness contributes a lot to scepticism when first presented with it. I have to admit I had this "you're making it up" reaction to allergic people. I literally thought, when I was a kid, that nut-allergy is overblown, people who claim that they're allergic to X is actually just fussy eaters, etc. (Now I know better) As an example, I have contact dermatitis (red rashes, itchy) when I wear leather watches. If the watch has a plastic band or metal band, then it's fine. But leather always does it for me. Part of me is thinking: is this because it's made from a mammal's skin? But another part of me is really thinking: am I taking this too far? Maybe it's something else? The worst thing is there's no doctors that would confirm my hypothesis. Reading online the symptoms of people who have this type of allergy is very different (people always list irritated bowel or skin rashes after eating meat), whereas for me when I eat beef (or even just soup made by using beef bones), it's actually: hard to breathe, my nose runs constantly (and effusively! - I am always amazed at the volume of snot that I can produce during the allergic times) I have this reaction with other types of meat as well, but chicken is fine. It made me think a lot about what I eat. Since the reaction has been mild, I've been adventurous at times, when I really craved steaks. My doctor hearing about it afterwards was aghast: she said I should never, ever do that again and I might die. And really the child in me is still thinking: is this overblown? Would I really die from it? It's so frustrating not knowing -exactly- what can I do or not do. It either goes from: you're going to die, to OK pop these Desloratadine pills and you're going to be fine, to "I don't think it's allergies, you have -X disease-"
castillar76 6y ago
This happened to me following a tick bite, and I spent a year not eating mammals of any kind. Not eating beef or steak or pork or lamb is surprisingly easy on the surface and the choices are better than they used to be. But it's amazing how many mammal products have snuck their way into our food chain underneath, and those were the hardest things to avoid. Gelatin in liquid medicine capsules, pork-fat as a soup additive, chicken wings fried in beef tallow, the list goes on and on. And explaining to people in restaurants that you can't eat mammals because you'll swell up and die six hours later gets you a lot of weird looks. Mercifully, after a year of being absolutely clean, I got a clean bill of health from my allergist: no more alpha-gal proteins in my system, and I can now eat soup in a restaurant or order the wings without worrying I'll wake up choking to death later on. As a plus, I will say it improved my diet considerably and got me to think a lot about what I eat, so the experience was not without its benefits. That said, I wouldn't recommend the experience to anyone.
- kibwen 6y ago
  > And explaining to people in restaurants that you can't eat mammals because you'll swell up and die six hours later gets you a lot of weird looks. It's worth spreading awareness that there are way, way more things that cause allergic reactions than is commonly known. As a kid I grew up thinking that only peanut butter could cause allergic reactions. Now I know someone who has fatal reactions to dairy products, another with fatal reactions to eggs, and others with less severe reactions to mint, coconut, mango, latex, spermicide (imagine the circumstances where you discover that one)... The bottom line is, if someone tells you they have an allergy to something weird, just take their word for it.
  - castillar76 6y ago
    I really wish more people would heed this. It's obnoxious, and I know people take advantage of it (and wish they wouldn't!) to claim allergies to things when they just don't like them. But it's just not worth playing with someone's health. I'm really lucky that people believed me when I told them I had to know what things were fried in or whether they'd used beef stock for that soup.
  - 6y ago
PaulHoule 6y ago
My wife (a horse riding instructor who spends a lot of time outdoors) and I were talking about the severity of our reactions to tick bites. We were thinking that a stronger reaction would mean removing them more quickly and be protective against Lyme disease and similar tick-borne diseases. Both of us thought that our reaction to ticks had gotten more severe over time and we were thinking that was a good thing.
- anodyne33 6y ago
  This spring, unsurprisingly, I started spending a larger than normal portion of my time in the woods. I brought an uncomfortable number of (deer) ticks home in the spring and again in recent weeks. This is every bit or more frightening personally than Covid is. At this point I know every skin tag and mole on my body from doing thorough check downs every time I get home from hiking. In Pa. we have the East Stroudsberg U Tick Research Laboratory who will take a specimen of any tick found embedded or not and run a basic pathogen panel free. The few I've sent in have been clean but being familiar with my bestie's dad's experience with Lyme there's no chance I'm not being as proactive as possible.
- Loughla 6y ago
  I've lived near where my spouse and I moved for most of my life. The woods behind the house we currently live in are where I spent most of my childhood. Ticks are just part of the territory (many springs and seeps = many ticks). I have never had problems with tick-borne illnesses. We moved back here 14 years ago, and within one month my spouse was diagnosed with Lyme disease. My theory is that I'm immune to it due to repeated tick exposure as a kid. Otherwise, it just doesn't make any sense.
astuyvenberg 6y ago
The α-gal story is one I continue to enjoy learning about. If you haven't listened to it yet, RadioLab has an excellent episode on the topic: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/alpha-gal https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/alpha...
syntaxing 6y ago
NPR had a great episode about this! A lot of people that I grew up with had chronic fatigue. We lived in one of the most tick populated area in the US and the teachers will just let us roam the shrubs and trees when we were on school trips. I always wondered if the population suffered from under tested and diagnosed Lyme and Lone Star disease.
folli 6y ago
I just recently did some literature research on this, it's definitely very interesting. -The antigen causing the allergy is called alpha-gal (a glycan, i.e. a sugar based molecule, present on proteins) -Humans are one of the few mammals that do not produce Alpha-Gal natively -IgG and IgM antibodies against Alpha-Gal are very common in healthy individuals even in high titers, however IgE (the type of antibody causing allergies) is rare -For some unknown reason, tick bites induce IgE antibodies against Alpha-Gal (possible reasons are the frequency (you get stung several times over several years, like repeated booster shots) and the saliva of the tick causing Th-2 response (converting IgG to IgE excreting B-cells) -There's a famous case of a therapeutic antibody against cancer (Cetuximab) that is produced in mouse cells (remember: mice produce alpha-gal) that causes anaphylactic shocks (meaning a strong allergic reaction)
chihuahua 6y ago
I had the same experience after a couple of tick bites in northern Europe around 1990. It went away after a few years. It saved me from eating beef in the UK when they had Mad Cow disease so maybe it's a blessing in disguise.
rootsudo 6y ago
That's an interesting way to diet too, forced vegan.

123 points by sohkamyung 6y ago

So you can be literally infected with vegetarianism now? (brb writing a novel about a secret agent trying to stop a terrorist vegan organization from putting this in the water supply of new york city.)

masonhensley 6y ago
Yep - this happened to a family member about 9 months ago. Wasn't as straight forward as you might think to diagnose.
- bobo_legos 6y ago
  This seems to be the story with a lot of tick related illness. People come down with some random illness and they see doctor after doctor who runs a battery of tests that yield no results. Finally someone decides to run the test for Lyme Disease and lo and behold the results come back positive. Kris Kristofferson is a prime example. His doctors thought his memory loss was due to dementia, until a someone finally decided to test for Lyme Disease. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kris-kristofferson-misdiagnosed-alzheimers-has-lyme-disease/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kris-kristofferson-misdiagnosed...
  - KozmoNau7 6y ago
    A childhood friend of my sister was always shorter and skinnier than her classmates, didn't really hit the same kind of growth spurt as they did. I think she also had some indicators of ADHD, and she did run out of energy rather quickly. It turned out after quite some time that she had lyme disease, and once that was treated, she basically hit her growth spurt with back interest. It was honestly surprisingly how much of a change it made. She grew much taller, and now has a very active career as a musician and social activist, barely ever sitting still for very long.
syntheticnature 6y ago
Not true vegetarianism; just can't eat mammal-derived meat. Other animals are still fair game. (pun not intended, but I'll take it)
- justusthane 6y ago
  Primates are also fair game.
  - folli 6y ago
    Chicken might be an easier obtainable answer.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    Primates are mammals...
    - echelon 6y ago
      > Primates are mammals... That don't produce alpha-gal, the glycan that generates this allergy. If humans produced alpha-gal, negative selection would typically remove it as a possible ligand, and this would rarely happen.
      - nicoburns 6y ago
        Ah, gotcha. Well I won't be eating any primates, but that's interesting to know.
        echelon 6y ago
        Biology is such a fascinating field. You've got bizarre disease states, immunobiology (a vast field in its own right - B cells, immunoglobulins, antigens, amplification, negative selection, etc.), evolution, and even ecology. Just in this one problem.
okprod 6y ago
Is the sequel to that novel a story about women taking over the tech sector
rozab 6y ago
That is... a surprisingly interesting idea. Maybe swap terrorists for a certain nationalist government aligned with a certain vegetarian-leaning religion?
- ky3 6y ago
  Don't have a dog in this race, but doesn't that certain vegetarian-leaning religion also prohibit violence against human beings? How do the terrorists square such contradictions in their mind? And is that one of the many mysteries driving the narrative in GP's novel forward?
  - SiempreViernes 6y ago
    You'll not be surprised to hear that religions all have "national security exceptions" to their non-violence clauses. I offer as evidence: all the crazy religiously motivated violence perpetuated by any long living religions (the truly peaceful ones being beaten to death long ago).
sannee 6y ago
This was apparently one of the story points in Fish to Mars by Peter Watts ( https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8217 https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8217 ).

stuff4ben 6y ago

I wish they'd have gone into the research being done to combat alpha-gal meat allergies. Living in NC and loving meat, this concerns me.

metiscus 6y ago
Given that there are only 5000ish cases in a country of 300+ million, right now your odds are pretty good. Best to take precautions when you are in the woods because ticks have other nasty things they bring along which are also quite bad. Treat outer garments, ground cloths, packs, and tents with Permethrin. Wear a DEET based insect repellent. Wear long sleeves and long pants to prevent tick attachment. When in the woods check yourself daily and remove any ticks that you find as soon as practicable. If you are with someone else, check each other as ticks most often attach in places that are warm e.g. skin folds and it is difficult to check all of your own without assistance. Use a smartphone camera if you are alone. Most of my familiarity comes from Lyme disease but ticks that are removed within 12-24 hours are much less likely to spread Lyme disease. It is likely, but I do not have evidence to support this, that a similar fact is true for meat allergies.

justusthane 6y ago

My mom's own experience is remarkably similar to this: repeated unexplained allergic reactions landing her in the ER, eventually blaming an additive in the meat after realizing that meat seemed to be the culprit, and finally a chance conversation with a paramedic leading to the actual cause: alpha-gal allergy caused by a lone star tick bite several years before. Except she lives in Wisconsin, not Australia.

atwebb 6y ago
Happened to me as well (Tennessee), was really, really surprising and the reaction seemed to be mainly around less cooked meat. I stopped eating beef and most pork for a few years and then slowly reintroduced it, now there is no issue. This was about 10 years ago and lasted around 5 years.
- justusthane 6y ago
  Ah, that’s funny! We had traveled to TN somewhere around ten years ago, and assume that’s where she was bit. The lone star tick has apparently made it as far north as Wisconsin though. Glad you’re over it now. My mom recently has had very small amounts of meat products without issue.
- knaq 6y ago
  Meat is hypo-allergic and free of prions if you cook it enough. It should be black in the middle, white on the outside.

linuxftw 6y ago

I personally know multiple people that became intolerant to beef after a tick bite, rather than all mammalian meat. The symptoms manifested as digestive stress: abdominal cramping, nausea, and diarrhea. The onset of symptoms might be delayed for minutes or hours. In one case, the person started to lose ability to tolerate a wide variety of foods. Further investigation revealed some symptoms that seemed to be related to MTHFR mutations. Genetic analysis confirmed this. Prior to analysis, began supplementing with 5-methyltetrahydrofolate. This began to immediately improve symptoms and foods were able to be added back to the diet. This continue for some time and hit a wall. Eventually traditional Chinese medicine doctor prescribed some herbal supplements. The person in question still avoids beef, but is otherwise back to their pre-tickbite diet and living a normal life after years of struggling.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Bjartr 6y ago
So was it beef sensitivity or just a folate deficiency?
- linuxftw 6y ago
  Something about the beef sensitivity (possibly caused by a confirmed tick bite) seemed to cause the situation to spiral into more food intolerances. Symptoms started to mimic others with an MTHFR mutation. That mutation results in less production of some enzyme that metabolizes folate into another form (eventually leading to the form I posted 5-something-or-other). Taking that supplement allows you to bypass the folate conversion metabolic pathway. How does this all fit together? I'm not entirely sure, this is an emerging area of research, I can only share what worked for the person I know. This MTHFR business seems to be related to histamine levels as well, that methlylated folate seems to be used by the liver to metabolize histamine. This seems to be directly related to allergic immune responses. Hypothesis: Most people can tolerate the small amount of immune response triggered by the a-gal protein. People with MTHFR mutations cannot. The exact causative pathway, TBD.

hirenj 6y ago

This is, like so many other stories, another glycobiology story in disguise! I had a great discussion with one of our collaborators about where we thought the alpha-Gal came from that is so antigenic. Our rough hypothesis was that this is a microbiome related problem, and there’s now some kind of bacteria (or something else!) resident to ticks that produces this sugar. My bet is that the little beastie that produces this epitope has adapted to produce alpha-Gal to avoid detection by the immune system in other mammalian hosts. The tick is simply a delivery mechanism for the alpha-gal producing organism. Here’s the thing though - I don’t quite get why we don’t know what is going on yet. We (probably) have genomes for the ticks, and we can guess (sort of ok) what sugars they can make. We can also do microbiomes to figure out which possible beasties are found in the saliva. I must be missing something big so as to explain why we’re not much closer to answers?

newdude116 6y ago
"We can also do microbiomes to figure out which possible beasties are found in the saliva. " Good luck with that.
- hirenj 6y ago
  Ha, yes okay maybe just from their secretions may be a tad optimistic. However, there are some papers out there about the associated microbiota, although I have no idea if they just mushed the whole tick up to get enough material.
  - newdude116 6y ago
    To give you an idea: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1279316/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1279316/ "We are grossly ignorant of bacterial life on earth. Environmental microbiologists estimate that less than 2% of bacteria can be cultured in the laboratory. "
- centimeter 6y ago
  In the last 2-3 years, several sequencing labs have popped up that specialize in separating pathogen DNA from host DNA. Presumably someone like the UCSF next-gen diagnostics lab could grind up a bunch of ticks and isolate the different DNA sources. They've done similar things with other animal pathogens.

rntksi 6y ago

I have red meat allergy (specifically stronger for beef). IgE present for that specific test and all. I've always thought allergic people were over-reacting. I've never had any kind of allergies before, but when I grew up and travelled, I found out that I had this particular nasty reaction with my nose. At first I thought it was pollen allergy. Now I understand more about allergies. This type of allergy has very little scientific materials to read about so I appreciate OP's link. I just want to know more about it: what made me turn from non-allergic to very-allergic suddenly? And why beef?

tt433 6y ago
Allergies are very strange. The skin in my mouth falls off when I eat beans, and there is very little literature about that one either.
- FeistySkink 6y ago
  I have the same reaction to some spice (plus tongue blood blisters) and I cannot figure out which. Usually it's some poor-quality take away.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    Sichuan Peppercorns[1] possibly? They're not used typically in Western cuisine even as a flavor enhancer, but they would appear in more authentic Eastern takeout and they have some weird chemistry going on with tongues. [1]: https://www.thespruceeats.com/sichuan-peppercorn-info-694248 https://www.thespruceeats.com/sichuan-peppercorn-info-694248
    - FeistySkink 6y ago
      Could be, as I had it from some Asian takeaway. But I also get it from some cheap pizza.
- rntksi 6y ago
  Its strangeness contributes a lot to scepticism when first presented with it. I have to admit I had this "you're making it up" reaction to allergic people. I literally thought, when I was a kid, that nut-allergy is overblown, people who claim that they're allergic to X is actually just fussy eaters, etc. (Now I know better) As an example, I have contact dermatitis (red rashes, itchy) when I wear leather watches. If the watch has a plastic band or metal band, then it's fine. But leather always does it for me. Part of me is thinking: is this because it's made from a mammal's skin? But another part of me is really thinking: am I taking this too far? Maybe it's something else? The worst thing is there's no doctors that would confirm my hypothesis. Reading online the symptoms of people who have this type of allergy is very different (people always list irritated bowel or skin rashes after eating meat), whereas for me when I eat beef (or even just soup made by using beef bones), it's actually: hard to breathe, my nose runs constantly (and effusively! - I am always amazed at the volume of snot that I can produce during the allergic times) I have this reaction with other types of meat as well, but chicken is fine. It made me think a lot about what I eat. Since the reaction has been mild, I've been adventurous at times, when I really craved steaks. My doctor hearing about it afterwards was aghast: she said I should never, ever do that again and I might die. And really the child in me is still thinking: is this overblown? Would I really die from it? It's so frustrating not knowing -exactly- what can I do or not do. It either goes from: you're going to die, to OK pop these Desloratadine pills and you're going to be fine, to "I don't think it's allergies, you have -X disease-"

castillar76 6y ago

This happened to me following a tick bite, and I spent a year not eating mammals of any kind. Not eating beef or steak or pork or lamb is surprisingly easy on the surface and the choices are better than they used to be. But it's amazing how many mammal products have snuck their way into our food chain underneath, and those were the hardest things to avoid. Gelatin in liquid medicine capsules, pork-fat as a soup additive, chicken wings fried in beef tallow, the list goes on and on. And explaining to people in restaurants that you can't eat mammals because you'll swell up and die six hours later gets you a lot of weird looks. Mercifully, after a year of being absolutely clean, I got a clean bill of health from my allergist: no more alpha-gal proteins in my system, and I can now eat soup in a restaurant or order the wings without worrying I'll wake up choking to death later on. As a plus, I will say it improved my diet considerably and got me to think a lot about what I eat, so the experience was not without its benefits. That said, I wouldn't recommend the experience to anyone.

kibwen 6y ago
> And explaining to people in restaurants that you can't eat mammals because you'll swell up and die six hours later gets you a lot of weird looks. It's worth spreading awareness that there are way, way more things that cause allergic reactions than is commonly known. As a kid I grew up thinking that only peanut butter could cause allergic reactions. Now I know someone who has fatal reactions to dairy products, another with fatal reactions to eggs, and others with less severe reactions to mint, coconut, mango, latex, spermicide (imagine the circumstances where you discover that one)... The bottom line is, if someone tells you they have an allergy to something weird, just take their word for it.
- castillar76 6y ago
  I really wish more people would heed this. It's obnoxious, and I know people take advantage of it (and wish they wouldn't!) to claim allergies to things when they just don't like them. But it's just not worth playing with someone's health. I'm really lucky that people believed me when I told them I had to know what things were fried in or whether they'd used beef stock for that soup.
- 6y ago

PaulHoule 6y ago

My wife (a horse riding instructor who spends a lot of time outdoors) and I were talking about the severity of our reactions to tick bites. We were thinking that a stronger reaction would mean removing them more quickly and be protective against Lyme disease and similar tick-borne diseases. Both of us thought that our reaction to ticks had gotten more severe over time and we were thinking that was a good thing.

anodyne33 6y ago
This spring, unsurprisingly, I started spending a larger than normal portion of my time in the woods. I brought an uncomfortable number of (deer) ticks home in the spring and again in recent weeks. This is every bit or more frightening personally than Covid is. At this point I know every skin tag and mole on my body from doing thorough check downs every time I get home from hiking. In Pa. we have the East Stroudsberg U Tick Research Laboratory who will take a specimen of any tick found embedded or not and run a basic pathogen panel free. The few I've sent in have been clean but being familiar with my bestie's dad's experience with Lyme there's no chance I'm not being as proactive as possible.
Loughla 6y ago
I've lived near where my spouse and I moved for most of my life. The woods behind the house we currently live in are where I spent most of my childhood. Ticks are just part of the territory (many springs and seeps = many ticks). I have never had problems with tick-borne illnesses. We moved back here 14 years ago, and within one month my spouse was diagnosed with Lyme disease. My theory is that I'm immune to it due to repeated tick exposure as a kid. Otherwise, it just doesn't make any sense.

astuyvenberg 6y ago

The α-gal story is one I continue to enjoy learning about. If you haven't listened to it yet, RadioLab has an excellent episode on the topic: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/alpha-gal https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/alpha...

syntaxing 6y ago

NPR had a great episode about this! A lot of people that I grew up with had chronic fatigue. We lived in one of the most tick populated area in the US and the teachers will just let us roam the shrubs and trees when we were on school trips. I always wondered if the population suffered from under tested and diagnosed Lyme and Lone Star disease.

folli 6y ago

I just recently did some literature research on this, it's definitely very interesting. -The antigen causing the allergy is called alpha-gal (a glycan, i.e. a sugar based molecule, present on proteins) -Humans are one of the few mammals that do not produce Alpha-Gal natively -IgG and IgM antibodies against Alpha-Gal are very common in healthy individuals even in high titers, however IgE (the type of antibody causing allergies) is rare -For some unknown reason, tick bites induce IgE antibodies against Alpha-Gal (possible reasons are the frequency (you get stung several times over several years, like repeated booster shots) and the saliva of the tick causing Th-2 response (converting IgG to IgE excreting B-cells) -There's a famous case of a therapeutic antibody against cancer (Cetuximab) that is produced in mouse cells (remember: mice produce alpha-gal) that causes anaphylactic shocks (meaning a strong allergic reaction)

chihuahua 6y ago

I had the same experience after a couple of tick bites in northern Europe around 1990. It went away after a few years. It saved me from eating beef in the UK when they had Mad Cow disease so maybe it's a blessing in disguise.

rootsudo 6y ago

That's an interesting way to diet too, forced vegan.