I Got Alpha-Gal (The Tick-Borne Disease That’s a Hunter’s Worst Nightmare)

It’s mid-August and my dad, a buddy, and I are tucked into our layout blinds as another flock of Canada geese swings in low toward our spread. When they line up perfectly, I holler “Take’ em!” and we greedily get to shooting, dropping four birds out of the flock. We’ve already piled up about 15 geese by now, but the early-season limit here in North Dakota is a generous 15 birds per person.

Many hunters—many waterfowlers, even—would look at so many honkers with a tinge of reservation. Goose meat isn’t valued as much as, say, a venison backstrap or elk tenderloin. But to me, our growing pile of geese looks like a mound of gold. That’s because Canada goose is one of the few red meats I can eat without getting sick. I have Alpha-gal syndrome, a tick-borne illness that makes its victim allergic to any mammal-based food product. The disease is carried by the Lone Star tick, and it’s becoming more prevalent all around the country (more on that later). For hunters like me, contracting Alpha-gal means no more elk backstraps, no venison cheeseburgers—not even a fried squirrel leg.

“Get down and load up,” I holler, watching another flock of geese appear over the horizon. “Here come some more.”

Technically, I'm allergic to a complex sugar called galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, or Alpha-gal for short. The New York Times Magazine published an in-depth report in July on mammalian-meat allergy that explains how the allergic disease is spread. This is an excerpt from the Times report:

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“When the lone-star tick feeds, alpha-gal leaks from its mouth into the wound, exposing the victim’s immune system to the sugar, prompting the immune system to remember and pursue alpha-gal. But exposure to alpha-gal alone probably doesn’t achieve this feat. [Dr. Scott] Commins, who is at the University of North Carolina, at Chapel Hill, has identified a candidate, an enzyme in the tick’s saliva called dipeptidyl-peptidase that works as an adjuvant. It’s also common in bee and wasp venom. This enzyme, Commins argues, is what tells your immune system to see alpha-gal as the type of threat that warrants the itching and swelling of the allergic response.”


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Last Edited by Coastie Patriot on 09/25/2019 03:08 PM