Alpha-Gal Syndrome, Carried By Expanding Tick Populations, Has Gone From Dozens Of Cases In 2009 To 450,000 Today

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Blood-sucking ticks that trigger a bizarre allergy to meat in the people they bite are exploding in number and spreading across the US, to the extent that they could cover the entire eastern half of the country and infect millions of people, experts have warned. Lone star ticks have taken advantage of rising temperatures by the human-caused climate crisis to expand from their heartland in the south-east US to areas previously too cold for them, in recent years marching as far north as New York and even Maine, as well as pushing westwards.

The ticks are known to be unusually aggressive and can provoke an allergy in bitten people whereby they cannot eat red meat without enduring a severe reaction, such as breaking out in hives and even the risk of heart attacks. The condition, known as alpha-gal syndrome, has proliferated from just a few dozen known cases in 2009 to as many as 450,000 now.

“We thought this thing was relatively rare 10 years ago but it’s become more and more common and it’s something I expect to continue to grow very rapidly,” said Brandon Hollingsworth, an expert at the University of South Carolina who has researched the tick’s expansion. “We’ve seen an explosive increase in these ticks, which is a concern. I imagine alpha-gal will soon include the entire range of the tick, which could become the entire eastern half of the US as there’s not much to stop them. It seems like an oddity now but we could end up with millions of people with an allergy to meat.”

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This leads to a confusing and fraught experience for the growing number of Americans with alpha-gal, who are now girding for another expected hot summer full of ticks. “The ticks are rampant this year, I’ve pulled 10 ticks off me this season alone, it feels like they are uncontrollable at the moment,” said Heather O’Bryan, a horticulturist in Roanoke, Virginia, who has alpha-gal. “They are so disgusting. I’m not afraid of a lot, but I’m afraid of ticks.” In 2019, O’Bryan suffered full body hives and struggled to breathe after eating a pork sausage. “It was terrifying experience, I didn’t know I had an allergy but it almost killed me,” she said. She now avoids products containing mammal-derived elements, such as certain toothpastes and even toilet paper, due to adverse reactions.

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/29/lone-star-ticks-increase-climate-crisis