‘Explosive increase’ of ticks that cause meat allergy in US due to climate crisis | US news

Blood subject ticks that trigger a bizarre allergy to meat in people they bite explode and propagate through the United States, insofar as they could cover the whole eastern half of the country and infect millions of people, have warned experts.

Lone Star Ticks took advantage of the increase in the temperatures of the climate crisis caused by humans to develop from their hearts in the southeast of the United States to regions previously too cold for them, in recent years, walking as far north as New York and even Maine, as well as the push to the west.

Ticks are known to be unusually aggressive and can cause an allergy to dead people through whom they cannot eat red meat without supporting a severe reaction, such as the bursting of hives and even the risk of heart attacks. The condition, known as Alpha-Gal syndrome, proliferated from a few dozen cases known in 2009 at 450,000 now.

“We thought that this thing was relatively rare 10 years ago, but it became more and more common and it is something that I expect to continue to grow very quickly,” said Brandon Hollingsworth, an expert from the South Carolina University who sought the expansion of the Tick.

“We have seen an explosive increase in these ticks, which is a concern. I imagine that Alpha-Gal will soon include the entire range of tick, which could become the eastern half of the United States because there is not much to stop them. It seems to be a quirk now, but we could end up with millions of people with a meat allergy. ”

The exact number of Alpha-Gal cases is not clear due to the collection of unequal data, but it is probably a serious sub-accountability because people may not connect their allergic reaction to tick bites. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that around 110,000 cases have been documented since 2010, but that the actual number could reach 450,000.

Cases will increase more as ticks spread, helped by their adaptability to local conditions, according to Laura Harrington, entomologist and specialist in Cornell University. “With their adaptive nature and growing temperatures, I don’t see many limits to these ticks over time,” she said.

Alpha-Gal is a condition of confusion because it does not cause an immediate allergic reaction, unlike an allergy to peanuts, with symptoms often appearing several hours after the consumption of meat. The syndrome is not caused by a pathogen but stimulates an allergy to a sugar molecule found in mammals and a range of other things, from tooth of medical equipment. Researchers think that the condition can decline over time, but is also aggravated by other tick stings.

This leads to a confusing and heavy experience for the growing number of Americans with Alpha-Gal, who now gire for another hot summer expected full of ticks. “The ticks are crawling this year, I have succeeded 10 ticks this season alone, I have the impression of being uncontrollable at the moment,” said Heather O’Bryan, horticulturalist in Roanoke, in Virginia, who has Alpha-Gal. “They are so disgusting. I’m not afraid, but I’m afraid of ticks. “

In 2019, O’Bryan suffered hives of the body full and had trouble breathing after eating a pork sausage. “It was a terrifying experience, I did not know that I had an allergy but it almost killed me,” she said. It now avoids products containing elements derived from mammals, such as certain toothpaste and even hygienic paper, due to undesirable reactions.

Dairy products, another mammals product, are also prohibited. “I learned what I can eat now, but I was so sad when I realized that I could no longer have pizza, I remember crying in front of a jelly pizza in the alley of the supermarket,” she said.

There is now an “almost constant” flow of new members to the Alpha-Gal Facebook support groups in which O’Bryan is a part, she said, with her Virginia region which now seems saturated by the condition. “Everyone knows someone who has it, I’m talking about a friend of a edge once a month when he was bitten because he is so afraid of having him and panicking,” she said.

Lone star ticks are aggressive and can quickly follow a human target if they detect them. “They will chase you, they are like a cross between a lens and a velociraptor,” said Sharon Pitcairn Forsyth, an ecologist who lives in the Washington DC region.

A particular horror is the prospect of rubbing against the vegetation containing a massive ball of juvenile solitary star ticks, known as “tick bomb”, which can provide thousands of tick bites. “They are so tiny that you cannot see them, but you should take it seriously or you will never remove them,” said Forsyth, who now carries a charpie roll to remove such clusters.

After being diagnosed with Alpha-Gal, Forsyth has set up online resources on the condition to help raise awareness and plead for better food labeling to include alpha-far warnings. “I receive calls from doctors asking questions about it because they just don’t know it,” she said. “I am not a health professional, so I simply send them research documents.”

While the climate warms up, due to the combustion of fossil fuels, ticks are able to move to areas that become pleasantly hot for them. An increasing number of deer, which welcome certain ticks, and the development of sprawling housing in natural habitats also causes more interactions with ticks. “The places where houses compete against habitats and parks where nature has denounced is the place where we see cases,” said Hollingsworth.

But many is still unknown, like why Lone Star Ticks, which has long been from the United States, suddenly started to provoke these allergic reactions. Symptoms can also be a variety of alarmed – Forsyth has said that it rarely eats now due to concerns of food in food and even alpha -far could be transported in the air, via the steam of cooked meat.

“Some people are afraid to leave the house, it’s difficult to avoid,” she said. “Many people who get it exceeds more than 50 years, so the first symptom of them has a heart attack.”

So how far can Alpha-Gal spread? Cases have been found in Europe and Australia, although weak, while in the United States, the Solidarity Star ticks could not move to the west of the rocky mountains. But other species of ticks could also be able to spread alpha -far syndrome – a recent scientific document has found that the tick of western black legs and the black leg tick, also called deer tick, could also cause the condition.

Hanna Oltean, epidemiologist in the Washington State Health Department, said it was “very surprising” to find a case of alpha-far in the Washington state of a person who died by a tick locally, suggesting that the tick of the Western black legs could be a culprit.

“The range spreads and emerges in new areas, so the risk increases over time,” said Oltean. “The state of Washington is very far from the range and the risk remains very low here. But we do not know enough about the biology of the way the ticks distribute the syndrome. ”

The propagation of the Alpha-Gal intervenes in the middle of a dam of disease threats of different ticks which moved through a warm warming up. The Powassan virus, which can kill people via brain inflammation, is always rare but develops, like Babesia, a parasite that causes serious illnesses. Lyme disease, a long feature in the northeast of the United States, is also booming.

“We are dealing with many serious illnesses transmitted by ticks and discovering new ones all the time,” said Harrington.

“There is a formidable urgency to face this with new therapies, but the problem is that retreats to us in terms of funding and support in the United States. There have been cuts to the CDC and the NIH (National Institutes of Health) Which means there is a decrease in support. It is a major concern.