If you feel strange symptoms such as stuffiness or mucous in the nose, nausea or rash, it could be that you have got meat allergy. It is a reaction to galactose (alpha-1 3-galactose) also known as alpha-gal. It is also Mammalian Meat Allergy (MMA) that makes the body to incur an overload of immunoglobulin E antibodies when it gets into contact with carbohydrate.
Meat from any mammal beef, pork, lamb, goat or any mammal like a seal or whale can cause allergy. It is not common to hear of people with alpha-gal allergy, but it happens and is the rise. Lone star tick has been the culprit in making Best Nursing Writing Services people allergic to red meat. This type of tick is predominant in the Southeast of United States in Texas, New England and Iowa.
How Does A Tick Cause Meat Allergy?
Alpha-Gal a sugar molecule causes an allergic reaction to meat, and it is present in Lone Star ticks. A bite from a Lone Star tick spread to the human beings, and it starts to rewire the immune system. Rural dwellers that live in Nursing Capstone Writing Services places with animals are prone to bites from ticks. If a Lone Star has been sucking blood from a mammal and bit you after that, it activates the allergy immune system.
Paralysis tick (Ixodes holocyclus) is the culprit causing most of meat allergy cases in Australian regions. These ticks have Alpha-Galactose in their gut which they pick when feeding on a host. If the tick bites a human, it injects the allergen.
The bite alters the body to create antibodies and begin to attack Alpha-Gal sugar molecules. Most of the people who develop an Alpha-Gal syndrome realize they are ill after taking a meal with meat which also has the sugar molecules. Alpha-Gal is also in some medicine that uses gelatins as the stabilisers.
There is a time delay. Hence the allergic reaction might not be salient soon after eating meat. Many people never realize they react until after hours. An adverse response is likely to occur when Alpha-Gal travels through the gastrointestinal tract before release. It only after the digestion process when the patients experience shortness of breath hives diarrhea and vomiting.
Treatment for Meat Allergy
The allergic reaction does not have a definite treatment method as it is still an area under study. Meat allergy due to tick bites does not have a vaccine. Physicians control it by managing the symptoms with corticosteroids and antihistamines. Severe reactions especially anaphylaxis requires remedying with prescription epinephrine.
These approaches stop the allergic reaction although there are few reports of patients who doctors had to admit in the ICU. The reason is that the blood pressure in patients with severe reactions to MMA is extremely low putting them in danger of death.
Treatment becomes complex because many people do not know the cause of their allergic reaction. It is only after many allergic reactions that they determine that a diet of meat is the cause of their outbreak. Repeated exposure to tick bites might worsen the reaction. The patients who develop more antibodies symptoms to fight Alpha-Gal get the most severe reactions because of more exposure to ticks.