People living in the southeastern United States are developing a rare allergy that causes them to react to eating meat from four-legged animals, such as cattle and pigs.
Cases of the allergy have jumped recently after a wet spring, according to WJLA. Researchers have traced the allergy back to the Lone Star Tick that populates an area from Texas up to Nebraska and across to Florida and Maine.
“There are about 5,000 patients in the world who have it, and we believe that about 10 percent, 500 or more, are here in the central Virginia area,” allergist Joey Lane said.
The allergy develops after someone is bitten by a tick that has already fed off an animal that carries alpha-gal, a sugar molecule found in most mammals but not in humans. Alpha-gal from the tick seeps into the person it has bitten, and the host’s body treats the molecule as a virus and develops antibodies to fight it.
Afterward, the person’s immune system is geared to fight alpha-gal whenever it detects it, most often when the person eats something that has the molecule in it already. The person usually develops allergy symptoms 3-6 hours later, making the cause difficult to pinpoint in undiagnosed victims.
Most people with the allergy eventually get over it as long as they stay away from its triggers, though researchers are unsure how long that may take.
Scientists at Revivicor have not come up with a way to cure the allergy, but they may have found a way to return some of what was lost back to patients. David Ayares’ team has cloned and bred a family of pigs that do not have the alpha-gal sugar, and the Food and Drug Administration has granted Revivicor approval to begin testing if the animals are safe to eat.
“There are hundreds of products that come out of a pig — whether it’s enzymes or heart valves or heparin or collagen or gelatin that these very sensitive patients have to be concerned about,” Ayares said.
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