Tick season is upon us again, and so are conversations about the East End’s public enemy number one. Mosquitoes might be more annoying, but ticks and the diseases that they carry are far more dangerous, at least here on Long Island. My own claim to fame in the tick department, albeit slight, is that I could be patent zero for a novel tick-caused allergy to red meat, at least in our area.
My first attack came in about 1991. The tick connection to meat-related anaphylaxis was not identified until 2007. A doctor here now thought of as an expert on it scoffed openly when it first came up in conversation; now the doctor lectures on it.
On and off during the 1980s, I worked as a field archaeologist on a Georgia sea island, which was also a hot stop for tick study. Several times while I was on the island with a team from the American Museum of Natural History, researchers arrived to harvest ticks from deer and raccoons. They set up their lab in an adjacent cabin to where we cooked and ate our breakfasts and dinners, hauling carcasses up onto tables to meticulously hunt for ticks in their fur. Also during that time, I visited a hunting camp in the Georgia Piedmont, where, I suspect, I was exposed to yet more ticks.
The Southern piece of the story is notable because the red meat allergy is triggered by the bite of the lone star tick, which only began appearing on Long Island in the last decade and a half or so. When I was a teenager, the northernmost range of the lone star tick was southern New Jersey; today, they have expanded all the way to the Canadian border. But the tick that got me could also have been on Long Island; by 1990, lone star ticks had reached here.
Blame climate change. Lone star ticks are responsive to subtle changes in temperature and moisture in the environment. As the East Coast gets hotter and more humid, they have found a happy home. Researchers have also noted their propensity for rapid genetic adaptation, which, combined with their aggressive hunting for blood meals, has them poised for even greater expansion.
Somewhere I am sure there is a clip of a network television news item from about 1998 about people with odd allergies. The producers had called me at the suggestion of my New York City allergist, and they drove out for the day to film me walking on the beach with my dog, working in the Star office, and eating a tuna sandwich. Now the allergy is ubiquitous around the South Fork. I can scarcely go a week without hearing about someone else who has it.
There are Facebook groups. Servers in restaurants now no longer smirk when I try to explain. At least one pork producer has gained Food and Drug Administration approval for pigs bred free of alpha-gal, the sugar that causes the severe reactions in people like me. Not that I care; I haven’t had bacon for years and see no reason to start eating it again now.