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Tick Bites Are Causing Red-Meat Allergies. What to Know About Alpha-Gal Syndrome

An adult female lone star tick (Amblyomma americanum) crawls on a blade of grass. Image courtesy CDC. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)Doctors in the U.S. are hearing an odd complaint from their patients more frequently: lifelong meat eaters are suddenly breaking out into hives, getting bad stomach pains, and are sometimes vomiting or having diarrhea after eating red meat.The symptoms are typical of alpha-gal syndrome, a strange tick-borne illness first identified in the 2000s that induces an allergy to a specific type of sugar found in red meat. Most mammals (but not humans) have...