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The vegan plague is upon us: THE TICK THAT GIVES PEOPLE MEAT ALLERGIES IS SPREADING

mulazer

mulazer

OH, LOVELY: THE TICK THAT GIVES PEOPLE MEAT ALLERGIES IS SPREADING

ALAMY
FIRST COMES THE unscratchable itching, and the angry blossoming of hives. Then stomach cramping, and—for the unluckiest few—difficulty breathing, passing out, and even death. In the last decade and a half, thousands of previously protein-loving Americans have developed a dangerous allergy to meat. And they all have one thing in common: the lone star tick.
Red meat, you might be surprised to know, isn't totally sugar-free. It contains a few protein-linked saccharides, including one called galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, or alpha-gal, for short. More and more people are learning this the hard way, when they suddenly develop a life-threatening allergy to that pesky sugar molecule after a tick bite.

https://www.wired.com/story/lone-star-tick-that-gives-people-meat-allergies-may-be-spreading/


Does anyone get the feeling that we're in one of those doomed timelines where some random bufoon with a time machine unleashed a butterfly of doom .
 
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Is it ironic that a tick makes you allergic to feeding on other animals? According to the Wikipedia article on the bug, it only affects non-primate mammalian meat, so the good news is that cannibalism is still game.
 
People in this thread are really taking my remarks on cannibalism way too seriously.
 
Jakyl said:
People in this thread are really taking my remarks on cannibalism way too seriously.
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Because there is a horror unlike any other scourging the countryside, making the red meat of deliciousness into horrible, horrible poison to eat for some in some sort of twisted dystopia straight out of the Twilight Zone.
 
What are the actual numbers on this?

I've never heard of anyone being allergic to meat at all before, and being 10x more likely to be allergic to meat if you're from the southeastern US could mean anything from 'one in a hundred instead of one in a thousand' to 'one in a hundred thousand instead of one in a million'.
 
Cow farms will be switched out for gorilla farms, fences will have to be updated, either chemical or mechanical lobotomies for the young and the meat market will continue with a slight increase in cost until a breed of fatter gorillas is created.
 
Vindictus said:
What are the actual numbers on this?
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So, after looking into this myself... This has all of 3,500 reported cases in the US.

That is to say, out of 321 million people, only 3.5 thousand have it- meaning that you've got an approximately 1 in 100,000 chance of having or coming down with this.

This isn't a big deal. Even if you assume only half of the cases are diagnosed, it's not a big deal. Even if rates across the entire continental US reach the '10x' level that is reported in the southeastern states... It's not going to be a big deal.

I mean, hopefully they do figure out what makes this allergy tick, because even if it's not a society-changing issue it's still an issue for the people who do have it, but gorilla farms aren't going to happen.

(Also, if we ever reached the point where a significant fraction of the US had this allergy, it's more likely we'd just have people switch over to bird meat instead. Emu was faddish in the 90s and then got dropped like the fad it was, but it's a better beef substitute than gorrilla.)
 
I think we should just find a way to get the ticks out of our ecological system, as there are enough problems with them and their illnesses they spread.
 
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