WEST TISBURY, Mass. — Like a matador swirling his cape, Patrick Roden-Reynolds pulled a swatch of white flannel this way and that on the grass and leaf litter in my yard. After a minute or so, he plucked 11 tiny ticks from the cloth with tweezers, and stuck them on a lint roller. It wasn’t painful, but after several weeks I developed alpha-gal syndrome, an increasingly common allergy to red meat, dairy and other mammalian food products.
Like many on Martha’s Vineyard, a resort island off Cape Cod that’s teeming with ticks this year, I bid a sad farewell to hamburgers, bacon and lamb chops. My medicine cabinet became a minefield of animal-derived byproducts, including gelatin capsules and pain meds with lactose. If I err, and I do, my legs sometimes itch so fiercely they feel on fire and I break out in hives.
I grew ill one night just from the fumes of grilling meat. And I’ve got a mild case. Some victims suffer headaches, nausea, fever, diarrhea, vomiting or abdominal cramps so sharp that a friend calls them “knives in the stomach.” Martha’s Vineyard, long known for attracting celebrities, has become the inevitable butt of memes as it battles the hostile arachnids.
Editors from London to Hollywood, elated that blood-sucking predators are attacking A-listers on their private beaches, have posted lurid headlines about “Vegan Vampire” ticks and “Billionaires Under Siege.” The mechanical chomping shark in “Jaws,” which was filmed on the Vineyard in 1975, invariably gets a mention. As in the thriller, anxious local leaders debated whether publicizing the peril would scare off tourists. The island’s troubles are another reminder of the unexpected effects of climate change.
Once confined to the Southeast, lone star ticks spread from Maine to Oklahoma in recent years as the climate warmed and as a decline in hunting led to an explosive growth in the number of whitetail deer, where lone stars find mates and breed. The tick-borne allergy was discovered only in 2007, and researchers still can’t say why some immune systems go haywire and some don’t. A delayed reaction adds to the muddle because most victims don’t get sick until hours after eating, and weeks or months after the tick bite.
Jeffrey Wilson, a University of Virginia School of Medicine allergist and immunologist who has treated nearly 1,000 alpha-gal patients. Many were dumbfounded to discover that food they’d enjoyed all their lives suddenly made them deathly ill. 1. Roden-Reynolds does tick surveys throughout Martha’s Vineyard. . 2.
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