“Alpha-gal syndrome is triggered when a tick bite causes a person’s immune system to develop an allergic reaction to meat, including beef, pork or lamb.”
My friend literally refuses to go above the Mason-Dixie line because he might get bitten by a tick and get an allergy to red meat.
and ticks that can paralyze you.
I got fucked up by a paralysis tick. My throat swelled to the point I almost could not breathe. Was staying with friends in a remote rural area. Emergency services said It was too far to bother sending an ambulance. My friends were given a phone number to call if I stopped breathing. They would be instructed on how to give me a tracheotomy if that happened. Luckily for me it didn’t.
Unleash a possum army into the forest
funny thing birds are actually the best at eating and removing ticks from other animals.
I SAID UNLEASH THE POSSUMS!!! (opossums? Whatever.)
My step-dad got bit by one of these. He can only eat chicken now and it sucks.
It’s so scary that a bite from something the size of a pea can drastically change your life… Does he remember when being bitten and how long it took him to start having side effects?
Speaking as someone who had a really bad bout of lymes: no bullseye, no sign of bite, and lost a good chunk of my life being couch bound.
Kill all ticks!
He can’t eat beans or fruits or veggies?!?
huh. i know a dude who got bitten by one and he’s had to swear off all meat products, even poultry and fish. he was in cooking school learning vegan cookery when i met him.
I have heard mixed things about specific meats, but the guy I met was similarly vegan. He made it sound like he just wasn’t willing to experiment again. I think he got pretty sick. He was young too like thirty maybe.
I was raised believing I had to eat a bunch of meat, so I can totally see someone gagging down some chicken because they didn’t know what else to eat.
yeah, like even if it was just temporary props to the dude for going back to school (!) to learn vegan cooking in Texas of all places. Self-interest is the initial motivator behind a lot of things that end up helping a lot of other people.
WUUUUUT???!
Yeah, it’s becoming more common as the carrier ticks are able to expand due to climate change and more people are outdoors. There isn’t a good solution/treatment yet either, and it effects people differently. For some it’s a 3 month allergy, for many, it’s permanent.
I would kill myself if I couldn’t eat meat anymore, that or opt for a feeding tube and using up my insurance in a psych ward.
I mean you can eat non-read meat, and let’s be honest, probably best if everyone ate a little less meat in general.
just not red meat.
Stay inside or douse yourself with cancer chemical bug spray
Or deet
Sunlight is a class 1 carcinogen
almost everything causes cancer, just stop worrying about “carcinogens” and youll be so much happier
100% better off not worrying what causes cancer BUT that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stop try to actively prevent the odds of it happening like wearing sunscreen, using tick protection OFF Bug Spray (has 25% Deet) or grilling your food on a propane grill.
Of course the obvious not smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol and avoiding ultra proccessed foods but in the US there’s at least one of the three in use at all times so… fart noise
Obesity and overweight also a massive issue, 70% of Americans now, so add that to the list as well.
if a dietician was affordable maybe
Yes it does. But thats also a strawman used by large corpos to pour Roundup into our groundwater. Well guess what, we are paying for it now.
sources?
Um, farms?
you are a unhelpful walrus. do better my guy
Sure, and the fish as well while the frogs turn gay
Huh that second link is really interesting
Right up until the cancer gets you anyway.
Somewhere there is a vegan breeding these ticks and laughing maniacally.
They wouldnt be too smart if they were, because it’s not a meat allergy, it’s an alpha -galactose allergy, which is a sugar present in most mammals that people eat, but also many other foods, like carageenan, which is in many vegan products and medicine.
Nothing our little genetic engineering lab can’t fix, crispr is so cheap this days. Ugh, their lab I mean, their hypothetical lab.
yep, it’s possible. It’s called the “Lone Star” tick
"Theirs only one man who would DARE give me the rasberry. LONE STAR"
I’ve lost the bleeps, I’ve lost the sweeps and I’ve lost the creeps!
The what…?
The what…?
Go figure that a tick with a name reminiscent of Texas would make you unable to enjoy a steak.
Well, it’s expanding its reach because of climate change. Same with armadillos.
Yeah, I live in Kentucky and we have them here. Found one sucking my blood a few months ago after walking through a little patch of woods in my neighborhood. I’ll be really bummed if I can’t enjoy a steak someday.
good news! guess where everyone i’ve met who had it lived.
There’s been an entire ass radiolab on this one for years:
Iirc there is a good follow up episode on this as well from Radiolab.
Wild that no one believed it at first. Short amount of time for this to change, eh?
I really liked the follow up. Yeah it was the alpha gal free pigs. They did a good job
it’s been very well known anywhere within a few states of texas for like a decade, and it’s definitely spreading. The US government needs to get it’s shit together and then wipe that tick off the face of the map the same way they were handling the screw worm flys and the mosquitoes that carry west nile and the other ones that carry dengu fever.
Imo I think these ticks are cooking and we should breed them and release them into high beef consumption districts.
Put active effort into educating and making animal free food outcompete meat-based meals
Become a bioterrorist that doesn’t pay mind to accidentally killing kids (and adults) who suddenly get a life ending allergic reaction when having a meal cooked or cross contaminated with any animal product
“Which way, animal ally man?”
Obviously I was being sarcastic. I don’t actually believe we should be spreading ticks around, they can transmit other diseases as well. You could also get the same effect by injecting people with alpha gal.
But while we’re here lets have some fun:
shitpost
New emotion unlocked: laughing while horrified.
Idk if they were just biting people maybe, but I can’t help but wonder what effect removing carnivores would have. Education would be better.
I think the main problem is that corporate agriculture has already sidestepped the problem by creating genetically modified animals that don’t have the alpha gal molecules.
If I remember correctly alpha gal isn’t present in humans so our immune system can be programmed to use it as a marker. Most mammals have the molecule present on cells so if their thymus is functioning correctly they shouldn’t be able to develop an immune response to it.
I dunno. We might find a lot more vegetarians in the future.
A NJ man died from it tht end of last year. https://apnews.com/article/ticks-alphagal-death-meat-allergy-0db604bb7419a3b3b1b7c2639e40af1f
Oh good, I’m in danger
Ironically they mostly live in and around Texas.
Their prevalence is increasing with the climate shift, which honestly, I find hilarious. Drill baby, drill!
The world shall slowly turn vegan.
May their populations grow strong.
My wife loves beef but if she ever stopped eating it, I would call her my Alpha Gal
It’s been decades in planning by Big Vegan
And dairy!
Fortunately you’re healthier when you don’t eat dead animals
Ah yes, no concern for a poorly understood disease because its better known effect “doesn’t scare me”
Where have we heard this before
I mean there are a lot of problems with corporate agriculture being sidestepped here.
The world would improve greatly if vegan or vegetarian food had better marketing around quick and easy prep time.
Carrot, meet hummus
Pasta, meet jar of tomato sauce.
See also https://thecheaplazyvegan.com/ and https://www.theveganstoner.com/
I know the meals are out there. We just need people to dedicate their time online to astroturfing shared spaces with vege propaganda
I don’t know about astroturfing, but there’s a ton of resources on quick and cheap vegan meals.
That’s why you cook them first…
Are they not dead when you cook them?
Should we be earing and cooking them.while they’re still alive?
Not lobster. Mmmmm. Well shell fish.
My neighbors watched in horror one year when I grilled a lobster alive. They asked in terror : "Did you just put that lobster in the grill alive? I looked at them and said back: Ah yep! You buy them to kill them to eat them.
I just say that to upset the vegans, lol. Love, Live and Eat Meat.
I does not really bother me. I just think it is a shame how much unnecessary suffering there is.
You could easily kill the lobster before putting it on the grill with a knife.
Not sure how putting it on alive changes anything.
Like you are going to stop all the suffering. And kill it with what? A mallet? Oh yea, very humane.
I wonder if you would be like this if you’d get bit by this tick.
Real talk: you remember in the ninties when everyone started looking into agriculture in regards to cleanliness and not using sick animals and animal welfare?
After thirty years of ag gag laws and deregulation, that situation may not have improved.
You can eat meat if you want to. I recommend a cooking thermometer.
I’ll have well cooked meat occasionally, but I am not just eating marketing. If I eat meat I know it’s junk food and that it absolutely has to come to temperature.
Sort of like abstinence education, wrap it up folks you don’t want to know where that thing has been.
“Murder is ok only when you murder the healthy ones”
Do people on the east coast just not care about the diseases ticks carry? I feel like nobody is doing anything about ticks or the diseases. Back in the 80s they used to fly planes a few hundred feet over my house and open the back bay where a cloud of deet would come come pouring out. We’d stand out on the porch and watch and run inside before the cloud hit the ground. They did all that for mosquitoes.
Turns out that horrific for the environment and it’s easier to just tell people to stop killing opossums.
Opossoms don’t really eat many ticks. The methodology of that study was flawed because they only fed them ticks.
birds like eat ticks of mammals though.
so it turns out Statesians eat nothing but donuts. in this proposal to the IRB i would like to investigate…They are predators of mosquitoes and ticks, they aren’t supersoldiers of pest control like the study implies they are however a limiter in the ecosystem along with other animals people tend to kill and not think much about. It’s cheaper and easier to educate about not killing x than to eradicate a species and eat the consequences.
Well I used that as an example of the effort expensed not that it was a good solution. Similar to how opossums aren’t a solution. It’s been mentioned a number of times now they don’t help as much as first thought. Sounds like chickens or guinea fowl are better
so i googled alpha gal tick and this is the first map i found. it is not authoritative it came off social media. but i remember when the map didn’t include the west coast and lone star ticks were way further south.
They care, but there isn’t a ‘lot’ that can be done. These ticks range is expanding due to climate change, and even with proper precautions (sprays, clothing, monitoring) it still can happen. Lyme disease is a big thing in on the east coast, so they do know about ticks.
I seen a weird story where a helicopter was dropping boxes of ticks in fields.
