New Jersey man first known casualty of tick-caused ‘meat allergy,’ UVA researchers say

The death of a 47-year-old New Jersey man last year is now thought to be the first to stem from an “allergy” to red meat caused by bites from ticks.

The victim, whose name has not been publicly disclosed, went camping with his family in the summer of 2024.

He had steak for dinner one night before waking up in the middle of the night with abdominal pain, suffering from diarrhea and vomiting. He told his son “he had thought he was going to die,” University of Virginia School of Medicine researchers said.

Two weeks later, the victim had a hamburger at a barbecue, fell ill once again and died about four hours after eating the hamburger. The cause of death was the red meat allergy caused by bites from the Lone Star tick. The tick bites can make people sensitive to alpha-gal, a sugar found in the meat of most mammals.

Alpha-gal is not found in humans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The immune systems of people who develop the allergy, known as alpha-gal syndrome, can start identifying alpha-gal as a threat after detecting it in the saliva of the ticks. Due to this, the body suffers allergic symptoms when alpha-gal enters the body via consumed meat.

University of Virginia researcher Dr. Thomas Platt-Mills, who discovered the allergy, said that “severe abdominal pain occurring 3 to 5 hours after eating beef, pork or lamb should be investigated as a possible episode of anaphylaxis; and, second, that tick bites that itch for more than a week or larvae of ticks often called ‘chiggers’ can induce or increase sensitization to mammalian-derived meat.”

The man’s wife, the University of Virginia researchers said, reported that he had suffered several bites from chiggers over the summer. The bites, the university’s experts say, were actually from Lone Star tick larvae.

“It is important that both doctors and patients who live in an area of the country where Lone Star ticks are common should be aware of the risk of sensitization,” Dr Platt-Mills said.

Health officials identified more than 110,000 suspected cases of alpha-gal syndrome between 2010 and 2022, the CDC said.

A CDC map shows that Lone Star ticks can be found in the U.S. east of Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Montana in the Mississippi River watershed, along the coast of the Gulf of America and the East Coast, and south of most of Wisconsin and parts of Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont