An allergy to … meat?!
Meet mammalian meat allergy (MMA), a bonkers allergy to beef and pork that we can get after exposure to certain kinds of tick bites, and which can probably cause long-term chronic inflammation that’s nearly impossible to diagnose — a sensational example of many such possible sources. Here’s how this works…
First you get bitten by a very particular tick, like the delightfully named “paralysis” tick in Australia (predictable), plus a few others around the world.
Then you probably think you’re fine! You might not even know you got ticked. But your immune system is starting to over-react to a molecule delivered in the tick spit — one that we do normally eat, but do not get injected.
And then you carry on with your life getting sick to varying degrees 2-10 hours after eating a steak or lamb kebab. (And it can be quite nasty.)
Et voila, now you have MMA! Crazy.
And don’t underestimate the diagnostic challenge of connecting delayed symptoms to such an unsuspected trigger!
MMA is not just about meat
MMA is AKA alpha-gal syndrome (AGS). “Alpha-gal” is the pronounceable short version of galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, the carbohydrate molecule injected by the tick. It is found mainly in mammalian meat. It is notably absent from poultry, eggs, and seafood.
But molecules are teensy and they get everywhere, like glitter. AGS can be found in small amounts in all kinds of odd places — like gelatin capsules for common drugs — and some people may be so sensitive to alpha-gal that they are often reacting to those subtle sources. Dunkman et al: “There is growing recognition of allergic reactions in these patients to other drugs and medical devices that contain alpha-gal.”
That’s an obscure wellspring of chronic, erratic flares of inflammation that could easily go undiagnosed, because this nonsense was only discovered in the 2000s, and today it is still “an underrated serious disease” (Zhan et al).
Immune over-reactions are a bewilderingly bottomless pit of pathological possibilities, and many allergies are underdiagnosed and underestimated, flying well under the medical radar. The immune system can be a terrible thing when riled up, but it’s actually the tamer cases that interest me. Because of the inflammaging.
Meat allergy as an example of how inflammaging happens
Infla-what now?
“Inflammaging” is the adorable name for low-grade inflammation that escalates with age, prematurely if your out of shape (metabolic syndrome), but inevitably from many other causes that our out of our control — like allergies. As we build up our defenses against infection (antibodies), our immune system gets trained up by all the antigens we’ve “met” (both pathogens and allergens), and those defenses start reacting to a wider range of foreign substances, sometimes including previously harmless ones (or our own proteins, which is autoimmune disease). This is why allergies often appear in middle age: we acquire them.
And vulnerability to pain and injury escalates in sync with inflammaging.
I am not suggesting that MMA (or any other weird allergy), is a common cause of “inflammaging” in itself — it’s too rare for that. But it is clearly a source for some people, and — this is the point — it is just one of many odd kinds of immune hijinks that are collectively common.
This post is an excerpt from an update to my full guide to sneaky inflammation.