Morning Edition; John Hacker

It's morning edition on 89.9K RPS. Allergies are a fact of life for many of us who live here in the four states. Most people are familiar with allergies that they were born with. But did you know that a tick-by can also make you allergic to beef, pork, or other malmed products? That allergy can also occur if you're exposed to their bi-products. John Hacker of Carl Junction, Missouri, recently wrote a piece about this for the Joplin Globe. We spoke with John on Wednesday morning at the Coco Art Gallery in Carthage. John, thanks for joining me this morning. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So in your article, you write about Nikki Shaw. She started getting really sick last year, but she didn't know why. Exactly. And that's what happens with this allergy. You get bit by the tick. You go about your normal life. You know, beef or pork is a big part of almost everybody's, you know, a lot of people's normal diets. Sometimes you don't realize you don't realize you were bitten by a tick. You don't start getting sick for one, two months after you got bitten by the tick. And then to complicate it even further, this tick bite, it's the Lone Star Tick.

It's a relatively common tick around here. The female tick has a white adult female tick, has a white spot on its back. That's why it's called the Lone Star Tick. The male tick is just a brown tick. The babies are little tiny red things that look like chiggers. So you get bit by this tick. You may not get sick for one to two months. It makes you allergic to beef or pork. The tick injects a sugar in your body. That activates your immune system and creates this allergy. So you eat a hamburger or you eat a pork chop or you eat bacon. You may not get sick for two to six hours after you've eaten. So in the reactions are so varied depending on person to person. Some people end up having to go to the hospital with actual anaphylactic reactions where their throat is swelling up and they're having trouble breathing. They have hives. They have swelling in their faces, Nikki described and Wendy Rich is another founder of this group.

She looked like she had Botox. Her face was so swollen and she had to go to work that way. I can imagine it's just incredibly alerting. But the first thing that comes to my mind when I eat something and I get sick of it, it isn't an allergy. It's food poisoning. Exactly. That's exactly right. You don't think about, you think about there's something wrong with that particular burger. But then it happens over and over and over again. I've talked to people who had this allergy but didn't know it for years. And the medical community doesn't know a lot about it too. This alphagal, this is called alphagal. It's called alphagal after the sugar that's being injected, which has a more complicated name. Alphagal was only identified as an allergy in the last decade and a half, 2008. There were some doctors at the University of Virginia. We're studying some mysterious deaths from a cancer drug. It was generally helping people, but a few people after taking this. One of them was in Bentonville, Arkansas.

And one of the doctors who was on the team that identified this as an allergist, Dr. Tina Merritt, is an allergist at Northwest in Bentonville, Arkansas. She was told of a patient in Bentonville who had gotten sick and died after taking this cancer drug. She set up a study because she actually has this too. And she, like I said, she'd been part of the team that had been looking into these mysterious deaths. So she got the blood work of this patient and sent it in. And they figured out, well, this drug is being made using cow proteins. Proteins were cow. This patient came up positive for an allergy to mammal meat and that connected. So that then connected these deaths to this beef allergy. Well then, the doctor who actually lead the study to figure out what alpha gal was, his name is Dr. Thomas Platt-Smills.

He's a professor at the University of Virginia, also an avid hiker. Went to England and suddenly started getting sick after he, and started getting sick after happened for the first time in England. He was sick after eating beef in England. And he remembered that he'd gone hiking at his home in Virginia, stuck his foot in his boot, gone hiking, and came back and found dozens of tiny seed ticks. And was bitten by it. And then two months, three months later, he starts getting sick. And he realizes one of his students on his team, Dr. Merritt, has been allergic to beef and pork for years. He makes a connection. He tells her it's a tick bite. He says, now it can be a tick bite. But then they started doing tests, tested the tick's saliva. They found the sugar in this tick, identified this particular tick, the loam start tick, as the source of the alpha gal allergy. I want to thank you for your time this morning. Well, thank you very much for bringing some attention to this. It's something that I think thousands of people may have and don't know about it. John Hacker of Crawl Junction, speaking about his article, which appeared earlier this

week in the Joplin Globe regarding the alpha gal allergy. I posted this interview, along with a link to his Joplin Globe article, and a link to a local alpha gal Facebook group that meets at the Joplin Public Library at our news block, krpsnews.com.