A Tick Bite Made Them Allergic to Meat

[Nevilledog]

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Sarah Zhang
@sarahzhang
A little while ago, I heard that an organ-transplant company was sending some *very exclusive* bacon out to a very select group of customers. Here's the story!

theatlantic.com
A Tick Bite Made Them Allergic to Meat
And an organ-transplant company has an unexpected solution.
9:10 AM · Apr 25, 2022

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/04/alpha-gal-syndrome-tick-meat-allergy/629649/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/7tU8J

A few months ago, Candice Matthis and Debbie Nichols sat down with their husbands to have some bacon. It was an unremarkable scene, except for two details.

First, there were the EpiPens, which Matthis and Nichols both had ready in case of emergency. The two women can’t eat red meat, not after they were each diagnosed with a dangerous red-meat allergy that develops, oddly enough, after tick bites. They had bonded as friends over their strange shared fate, where a strip of bacon could send them into anaphylactic shock. Matthis is so sensitive that even the airborne particles wafting off a pan of cooking meat typically make her sick. But this time, nothing happened to her as the bacon sizzled. Her EpiPen remained untouched. Nichols made herself a BLT. “It had been years,” she told me. And for her, too, nothing happened, except that she remembered how good a BLT tasted.

Which brings us to the second remarkable thing about the meal. This bacon was not your regular bacon, or even your fancy pasture-raised, thick-cut bacon; this bacon was so exclusive that it’s not available in stores. It came from Revivicor, a biotechnology company that genetically modifies pigs to create organs suitable for transplant into humans. (One of its pig hearts was experimentally transplanted into a human for the first time this January.) It just so happens that the same molecule—a sugar called alpha-gal—that causes the human immune system to reject pig organs also causes the tick-associated red-meat allergy, known as alpha-gal syndrome. To make a pig whose organs could be harvested for transplant, Revivicor first had to make an alpha-gal-free pig. And when it did, the company realized that transplant surgeons weren’t the only ones interested.

Since last fall, Revivicor has been quietly sending refrigerated packages of alpha-gal-free bacon, ham, ground pork, chops, and pork shoulders to people in the alpha-gal-syndrome community. These packages were free, but Revivicor has told the FDA it is exploring a mail-order business. And so a biomedical company has found itself an accidental purveyor of specialty pork products.

*snip*

[Karadeniz]

1. Never heard of this allergy!

[DFW]

2. It will never make a difference to me

I have serious cholesterol issues. If it walks on four legs, I'm not supposed to eat it. Until they develop two-legged pigs that have feathers and lay eggs, I'm still not going to eat them.

[Elwood P Dowd]

3. Thanks for the info. I've had the alpha-gal syndrome for 14 years.

The first couple of times it hit me the ER doctors had no clue. Finally went to an allergy Doc who gave me a blood test that was positive for what some call "The Red Meat Allergy" or "Lone Star Tick" allergy. I haven't eaten any red meat since then, but I still had a couple of close calls from something I ate. Might have been veggies seasoned with something like bacon grease or cooked in a pot that might have also cooked something like beef stew.