Ticks Carry More Diseases Than Just Lyme. Here ’ s What You Need to Know

Chris Rose lost ten years of his health—not to mention his gallbladder—to a single tick bite. The tick bit in 2010 and Rose, now a 50-year-old network engineer in Chapel Hill, N.C., thought little of it at the time. “It was one of those lone star ticks,” he says, “and I just picked it off me. It wasn’t a big deal.” Before long, however, Rose began developing crushing chest pains, abdominal discomfort, diarrhea, and other symptoms. Doctors screened him for heart disease, irritable bowel syndrome, and gallstones, and even removed his gallbladder to see if that might ease the intestinal symptoms. But nothing worked, and the symptoms persisted for a decade. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Finally, in 2020, he visited Dr. Sarah McGill, a gastroenterologist at the University of North Carolina. She performed a colonoscopy and prescribed a round of antibiotics—to no avail—and then, as Rose recalls, McGill took a blood sample and said, “‘I want to test you for something. It may be a fluke, but we’ll see what happens.’” The next day, McGill called Rose with a diagnosis. “You’re allergic to red meat,” she said. What Rose was suffering from was a little-known condition called alpha-gal syndrome, an illness transmitted by the bite of a tick that has recently taken a blood meal from a deer. Deer, like all mammals except for humans, carry a sugar called alpha-gal in their bod...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Disease healthscienceclimate Source Type: news