Watch Scientific American add peptides to the militant vegan toolkit:
The bite of the lone star tick makes people allergic to a sugar found in mammal products, and many doctors don’t know about it.
It’s called alpha-gal syndrome. The tick bite causes an immune response to a sugar called galactose-α-1,3-galactose.
Fischman: Okay Tanya, you get the hard science word of the week.
Lewis: I thought you’d like that. The sugar, called alpha-gal for short, is present in most mammals except for humans and a few ape and monkey species.
Kersh: Alpha-gal syndrome is a tick-bite-associated allergic condition. We think people, after getting a tick bite, in the few weeks or maybe a couple of months after, they start having allergic reactions when they consume red meat or other products that contain the alpha-gal sugar.
