Ein gesunder 47-jähriger Mann aus New Jersey wurde tot aufgefunden, nachdem er auf einem Barbecue einen Hamburger gegessen hatte. Als Todesursache wurde „plötzlicher ungeklärter Tod“ festgestellt, nachdem eine Autopsie keine eindeutigen Ergebnisse ergab. Später wurde bestätigt, dass er der erste dokumentierte Todesopfer des Alpha-Gal-Syndroms war, einer durch Zeckenstiche ausgelösten Fleischallergie.

I’ve linked to the press release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:

https://www.jaci-inpractice.org/article/S2213-2198(25)00953-5/fulltext

From the linked article:

New Jersey man’s death first one to be tied to tick-related meat allergy

**A previously healthy New Jersey man has been identified by an allergist at the University of Virginia (UVA) and his coauthors as suffering the first documented fatality from alpha-gal syndrome, a meat allergy triggered by tick bites**. The case study was published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology in Practice yesterday.

The man’s name has not been released, but **he was 47 years old** and did not know tick bites had triggered an allergy to meat. Last summer he became severely ill three hours after eating steak during a camping trip. Two weeks later, **he was found dead after eating a hamburger at a barbecue**.

**The cause of death was ruled „sudden unexplained death,“ after an autopsy was inconclusive**, but the man’s wife gave the autopsy report to a doctor, who reached out to Thomas Platts-Mills, MD, PhD, the former chief of UVA Health’s Division of Asthma, Allergy and Clinical Immunology and first author of the case report.

Platts-Mills first identified alpha-gal syndrome in 2007 and is considered the foremost expert on the allergy.

In post-mortem blood samples, Platts-Mills found that the man had been sensitized to alpha-gal, and had had an extreme reaction, in line with what is seen in fatal anaphylaxis. Platts-Mills told CIDRAP news that the man’s tryptase level, a marker for mast-cell activation in allergic reactions, was 2,000 milligrams per milliliter. The highest tryptase level he had previously seen was 90.

Its something between 60 and 75% of people who have it go into anaphylactic shock when they have a reaction. Higher than any normal allergy. Also, the reaction is delayed 3-8 hours unlike a normal allergy. It’s incredibly scary because it can also sit dormant for months up to a year and isn’t testable for months after a bite.

So people can not see this tick bite them, have it fall off without notice, go several months about their life, eat a burger and go into anaphylactic shock and die without ever knowing any of that happened.

Time to go to war with ticks. Whatever we need to do.

I’ve had Alpha-Gal for over a decade. Ticks vacationing in Myrtle Beach. Golfed a lot, would routinely be pulling them off.

It’s the real deal. I felt like I was going to die for months until an elimination diet found the root cause.

when I figured it out, there wasn’t a lot of material on it. Told my doctor apparently I was allergic to beef and he casually said „well sounds like you should avoid it then!“ And that was the extent of help I got from the medical field.