‘Explosive increase’ of ticks that cause meat allergy in US due to climate crisis
‘Explosive increase’ of ticks that cause meat allergy in US due to climate crisis
Unusually aggressive lone star ticks, common in the south-east, are spreading to areas previously too cold for them
Vegans:
Honestly, I feel like this is a big fuck you from mother nature, telling us that our industrial farming practices, that are contributing so heavily to climate change, are now worth fuck all. And I am very much not a vegan.
You could join us before the ticks make you :)
I knew they were behind this.
Ticks can give you fuckers shitty diseases too, so hop off your soapbox buddy.
Yeah, but all ticks can do that. The "meat allergy ones" are a species that is only moving now because of climate change, which in no small part is also caused by emissions from factory farming.
“They will hunt you, they are like a cross between a lentil and a velociraptor,”
Well, that's a horrifying image.
Took us vegans a long time, but after hours in our labs we finally are ready to roll out our bio weapon.
Damn you, vegans! I’ll see you in hell!
Shakes fist angrily while collapsing from my simultaneous asphyxiation and heart failure.
And prion diseases.
Yes please! They have good music in hell. Also, in heaven there are only Christian Karens, pedophiles and antivax babies, you know how fucking annoying all those screaming babies are. And then complaining Karens on top of that.
Our insect creations acting like over-sized nano-bytes, go forth my children, save the planet.
NOOOOOOOOO!
Our vegan super soldiers are unaffected.
One of my friends got hit with this. They will have a violent allergic reaction even if they eat fries cooked in beef fat.
What kind of maniac cooks fries in beef fat?
That sounds like a recipe for cardiac arrest.
Steak n' Shake
That's actually extremely common. Belgian fries (the original French fries) are originally cooked in beef fat. But nowadays it's often a beef/plant based fat mix instead. It's actually quite hard to find vegan fries in Belgium.
The alt right health grifter sphere is currently obsessed with the evils of “seed oils.” Tallow is supposed to be magically better for you.
A couple of steps away from the raw milk drinkers and the “rebel canners.”
McDonald's
McDonald's does, assuming they haven't changed that recently.
Yeah we just need to proliferate wild guinea hens and other tick predators to knock their populations down. I'd rather the entire eastern US look like Kauai (random feral poultry) than have ticks take over.
Opossum are native, eat ticks and do not carry rabies. They are heros!
Maybe.. but there were so many examples of disastrous consequences for introducing a non native species to control a pest (biological pest control), like thr cane toad in Australia, or ferrets in New Zealand, etc...
Well, the upside is less meat consumption is good for the environment I guess.
The syndrome is not caused by a pathogen but spurs an allergy to a sugar molecule found in mammals and an array of other things, from toothpaste to medical equipment.
Lone star ticks are aggressive and can speedily follow a human target if they detect them. “They will hunt you, they are like a cross between a lentil and a velociraptor,” said Sharon Pitcairn Forsyth, a conservationist who lives in the Washington DC area.
A particular horror is the prospect of brushing up against vegetation containing a massed ball of juvenile lone star ticks, know as a “tick bomb”, that can deliver thousands of tick bites. “They are so tiny you can’t see them but you have to take it seriously or you’ll never get them off you,” said Forsyth, who now carries around a lint roller to remove such clusters.
Many years ago my dog brought in a tic bomb, and got into bed with me. I awoke to my left arm and hand covered in so many sesema seed sized tics I could not even see my skin.
It took hours to get them off me and my dog.
I dodged a bullet cause I didn't get any illnesses, nor did my dog.
I'm still freaked out though.
thats fucking terrifying. imma stay inside
Funny, humanity contributing to the reduction of the climate crisis by increasing the number of ticks causing people to become allergic to meat, meaning less demand for meat, meaning less greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere as cattle becomes less profitable.
Life, uh, finds a way.
My wife would be fucked unless this take out some preexisting allergies she has (quinoa, buckwheat, hazelnuts, peanuts, eggs and many legumes including soybeans although she doesn't react to soy lecithin)
I think you can still eat chicken if you have that
Yeah afaik it's only red meat
I have a soy allergy too and don't react to lecithin. My understanding is that by the time the soy is processed into lecithin, the "thing" you're allergic to is pretty much non-existent and that's why you don't react to it.
This isn't the case for all people who are allergic to soy. This is not medical advice.
My dog is alergic to a crazy amount of things and eats hydrolyzed food which apparently changes the proteins enough to not react to it.
Thirding this. I develop a rash even after coming into contact with something that had soybean oil on it, but lecithin is safe (for me).
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
“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.”
Alpha-gal is a confounding condition because it doesn’t cause an immediate allergic reaction, unlike a peanut allergy, with symptoms often appearing several hours after consuming meat. The syndrome is not caused by a pathogen but spurs an allergy to a sugar molecule found in mammals and an array of other things, from toothpaste to medical equipment. Researchers think the condition can wane over time but is also worsened by further tick bites.
Dairy, another mammalian product, is also off limits. “I’ve learned what I can eat now, but I was so sad when I realized I couldn’t have pizza again, I remember crying in front of a frozen pizza in the supermarket aisle,” she said.
Lone star ticks are aggressive and can speedily follow a human target if they detect them. “They will hunt you, they are like a cross between a lentil and a velociraptor,” said Sharon Pitcairn Forsyth, a conservationist who lives in the Washington DC area.
A particular horror is the prospect of brushing up against vegetation containing a massed ball of juvenile lone star ticks, know as a “tick bomb”, that can deliver thousands of tick bites. “They are so tiny you can’t see them but you have to take it seriously or you’ll never get them off you,” said Forsyth, who now carries around a lint roller to remove such clusters.
Symptoms can also be alarmingly varied – Forsyth said she rarely eats out now because of concerns of contamination in the food and even that alpha-gal could be carried to her airborne, via the steam of cooked meat.
“Some people are scared to leave the house, it’s hard to avoid,” she said. “Many people who get it are over 50, so the first symptom some of them have is a heart attack.”
The spread of alpha-gal comes amid a barrage of disease threats from different ticks that are fanning out across a rapidly warming US. Powassan virus, which can kill people via an inflammation of the brain, is still rare but is growing, as is Babesia, a parasite that causes severe illnesses. Lyme disease, long a feature of the US north-east, is also burgeoning.
“There’s a tremendous urgency to confront this with new therapies but the problem is we are going backwards in terms of funding and support in the US. There have been cuts to the CDC and NIH (National Institutes of Health) which means there is decreasing support. It’s a major concern.”
Where can you end up, after getting bit by a tick?
i remember crying in front of a frozen pizza in the supermarket aisle
Ticks are evil
Don't worry. The meat industry will find a cure fast
No crap. Republicans will be requiring vaccinations
My ex ran a very successful barbecue joint in Seattle and Arkansas. She got this and ended up shuttering her business.
I live in Arkansas and got my first lone star tick this year, thankfully I noticed right as it was biting me. 7 ticks in one month, mostly deer. Insane.
I wish you the best. It's going to be a rough bunch of decades until we die.
I see the vegans are escalating their tactics.
We'll convert the bloodmouths, one way or another! The next plan is mosquitoes that make you allergic to cheese.
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.
Alpha-gal (galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose) is a sugar molecule found in the cells of all mammals except humans and some primates
Well, at least we can still eat each other, it seems. The rich be lookin' mighty tasty as of late...
One time I saw a lone star tick crawl into the headphone jack of my phone.
I tried everything I could think of to get it out, to no avail. Then I googled two things:
After fifteen seconds of guinea hen sounds, I watched the tick crawl out of my phone... and immediately disappear.
Oh buddy, you should have killed it. ☹️ Stomped it out. Not only is there the meat allergy thing, but idk, they can probably still carry Lyme Disease & that's a real bitch.
Do you have experience with ticks? You can't stomp them. They're too small and flat with hard shells and don't squish. They have to be cut in half, burned, or drowned. Some people can kill them with their fingernails, but mine are too short.
I found two of them on my body later that night and killed them with tweezers. Or fire, I don't remember which.
Also, deer ticks carry Lyme disease, not lone star ticks.
I assume they would have, if it didn't immediately disappear
OMG lol at the description of lentil X Velociraptor!
Gaia hits back.
The syndrome is not caused by a pathogen but spurs an allergy to a sugar molecule found in mammals and an array of other things, from toothpaste to medical equipment.
Lone star ticks are aggressive and can speedily follow a human target if they detect them. “They will hunt you, they are like a cross between a lentil and a velociraptor,” said Sharon Pitcairn Forsyth, a conservationist who lives in the Washington DC area.
A particular horror is the prospect of brushing up against vegetation containing a massed ball of juvenile lone star ticks, know as a “tick bomb”, that can deliver thousands of tick bites. “They are so tiny you can’t see them but you have to take it seriously or you’ll never get them off you,” said Forsyth, who now carries around a lint roller to remove such clusters.
😱
"to areas previously too cold", huh... i wonder what happened...
The planet keeps {Chinese hoax}'ing.
Unusually Aggressive Lone Star Tick was my user name in the 2000s!
The cows are delighted.
And the vegans
And my Ox.
You can get concentrated permetherin, mix with water and apply with spray bottle to cotton clothes/socks. It bonds to the fiber and keeps the ticks off. Lasts several washes, longer if you don't dry clothes with heat.
Much cheaper to buy the concentrate instead of the premix.
Spray outside, allow clothes to dry outside. Stuff is pretty much harmless to humans. When still wet or in concentrate, it is absolutely deadly to cats. After it has bonded to your clothes, it won't hurt the cats. Doesn't work if you apply it to your skin, the skin oils or something deactivate it.
Haven't had a tick in years since I started using it.
Every time I go hiking with my dog I pull one of these little bastards off his fur. I cover him in permethrin, as well as every inch of my clothing, shoes and hat, so I'm not SUPER stressed about it, but it's still annoying. A couple days ago I found one in his tail floof (he's a golden so it's a giant poof.) The tick was near dead already by the time I got it untangled from his fur thanks to the permethrin though. Usually I spot the ticks on him either because they're on his head (where they're easy to spot immediately), or because they got tangled in his fur and couldn't jump off. I've never once seen one bite him thankfully.
It's wild to me because I have only seen other kinds of ticks twice so far this season, but otherwise it's all lone star ticks, which are not supposed to be the most common where I am. They're definitely more prominent this year though. Of all the tick diseases, alpha-gal terrifies me the most, so I'm not thrilled by this increase in lone stars.
I can't, nature got so enough of burgers, that it invented self injecting vacciness for their health issues!
And so their task force begins…
Nature will always win.
Yep, don't fuck with nature.
Payback for turning the frogs gay
That's like nuking Texas.
Meat production is a major contributor to climate change. This is almost as if nature is acting in self defense.
Would a meat allergy cause me to be allergic to myself? /s
How long before these ticks kill us?
They don't directly kill people; they make people allergic to mammal meat, so that they can't eat that any more.
I was low-keying a TF2 reference, I'm deeply sorry
I am hoping to take a vaccine that can kill them dead, or least take care of their parasites. As a guy who likes steaks, hot dogs, and juicy burgers, these ticks are abominations.
Oh, and the Wall of Flesh that prevents screwflys from spreading through the neck of Panama has started to fail. You and your pets will likely have your flesh being eaten.
What a wonderful time to live on the American continent. 🤕
Don't worry, if someone tries to make that a reality RFK will just say that it's a nanochip tracking super austism biological weapon shot that kills you a year later and nuke the program.
This year has been insane. I have pulled a dozen off my wife, myself and my child, and probably another dozen off my dog. Luckily none latched on so far.
Does this count for human meat as well
I feel like you commented on the wrong post maybe.
thx
Life is truly marvelous
Hooray! Less dead animals!
less fewer
I disagree
From what I understand (besides all the other effects of this it apparently causes), the end result for someone affected, if they were an omnivore that ate beef/pork/lamb would just switch to eating all seafood/poultry?
So, besides the extremely problematic ethics of spreading an extremely harmful condition worldwide, I think the net effect would be that a different set of animals would be getting killed, not that people would suddenly be eating more ethically....
As a vegan, I endorse those ticks!
Meat allergy? Unpleasant but ironically good for the environment.
After reading the article I hope they seek out and bite Donald Trump. Wouldn't that be hilarious if this caused him a meat allergy?
He would starve from hamberder deficiency
He'd live way longer if he stopped eating McDonald's
McDonalds would have to admit that there's actually no real fish in a filet o fish.
Not only the environment, the overall Americans health too. Each year, 700 000 Americans are dying from heart diseases.
There's more than one? Is this like Second Breakfast?
But I'm made of meat!
Yeah, Lyme Disease can potentially cause that. It's weird they're saying "meat allergy" and not lyme disease, but lyme is pretty bad and can cause lifelong complications (post-treatment lyme disease syndrome)Edit: guess I'm wrong
The lone star tick actually usually does not carry Lyme, you are thinking of deer ticks. This is an entirely different condition that is caused by an allergic reaction to the lone star ticks saliva which your body confuses with carbohydrates found in most mammalian meats leading to a long term meat allergy.
They don't refer to it as Lyme because it's a different issue. It just happens to also be spread by ticks. Lyme disease and Alpha-gal Syndrome are different things but are sometimes comorbities since both are commonly spread by ticks.
If you bothered to read the article, you'd have known this was Alpa-gal Syndrome, not Lyme.
lyme is caused by deer ticks and its a bacterial spirochetes, theres actually a whole cult against chronic lyme which is a pseudoscientific belief thats incurable.