The lone star tick can make you allergic to meat, and that’s not even the worst of it

The lone star tick is named for that little splotch in its back, which someone apparently thought looked like either a star or the shape of Texas.

Flickr user Joshua Allen

Ticks are horrifying, plain and simple. Even if they weren’t vectors for nasty infections, the fact that they swell up like tiny blood balloons and then burst if you don’t remove them properly is enough to make you never want to set foot in the woods again. And guess what: they can also make you allergic to hot dogs and hamburgers, which is pretty darn unpatriotic for a tick named Amblyomma americanum.

It's a case of cruel irony indeed that a tick named after Texas can render you unable to eat red meat. If it’s sushi you crave, you’ll be just fine, but barbecue is out of the question. If you’re bitten by a lone star tick and get the short end of the stick, what you really become allergic to is a carbohydrate called galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose. Alpha-gal is in most mammalian cell membranes, so the allergy doesn’t extend to non-mammalian meat. Poultry and seafood are all fine. And you really shouldn’t eat apes, but theoretically you could—they don’t have alpha-gal either (really, don't eat apes). Heck, you could even eat human meat if you wanted. The reason our bodies can recognize and react to alpha-gal as a foreign molecule is that we don’t already have it in our cells. If we did, an allergy to alpha-gal would actually present as some kind of autoimmune disorder, where the body starts attacking itself.

Read More at https://www.popsci.com/lone-star-tick-meat-allergy#page-2