First comes the unscratchable itching, and the angry blossoming of hives. Then stomach cramping, and—for the unluckiest few—difficulty breathing, passing out, and even death. In the last decade and a half, thousands of previously protein-loving Americans have developed a dangerous allergy to meat. And they all have one thing in common: the lone star tick. 
 
 Red meat, you might be surprised to know, isn’t totally sugar-free. It contains a few protein-linked saccharides, including one called galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, or alpha-gal, for short. More and more people are learning this the hard way, when they suddenly develop a life-threatening allergy to that pesky sugar molecule after a tick bite. 
 
 Yep, one bite from the lone star tick—which gets its name from the Texas-shaped splash of white on its back—is enough to reprogram your immune system to forever reject even the smallest nibble of perfectly crisped bacon. For years, physicians and researchers only reported the allergy in places the lone star tick calls home, namely the southeastern United States. But recently it’s started to spread. The newest hot spots? Duluth, Minnesota, Hanover, New Hampshire, and the eastern tip of Long Island, where at least 100 cases have been reported in the last year. Scientists are racing to trace its spread, to understand if the lone star tick is expanding into new territories, or if other species of ticks are now causing the allergy. 
 
 The University of Virginia is deep in the heart of lone star tick country. It’s also home to a world-class allergy research division, headed up by immunologist Thomas Platts-Mills. He’d been hearing tales of the meat allergy since the ’90s—people waking up in the middle of the night after a big meal, sweating and breaking out in hives. But he didn’t give it much thought until 2004, when he heard about another group of patients all suffering from the same symptoms. 
 
 This time, it wasn’t a plate of pork chops they shared; it was a new cancer drug called cetuximab. The drug worked, but curiously, patients that lived in the southeast were 10 times as likely to report side effects of itching, swelling, and a dangerous drop in blood pressure. 
 
 Platts-Mills teamed up with cetuximab’s distributor, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and began comparing patient blood samples. He discovered that all the patients who experienced an allergic reaction had pre-existing antibodies to alpha-gal, and cetuximab was full of the stuff, thanks to the genetically modified mice from which it was derived. With that mystery solved, Platts-Mills turned to figuring out what made patients so sensitive to alpha-gal. 
 
 The best hint he had was the geographic overlap between the cetuximab patients and previously reported meat allergies. The area perfectly matched where people came down with Rocky Mountain spotted fever—a disease carried by the lone star tick. But it wasn’t until Platts-Mills and two of his lab members came down with tick-induced meat allergies of their own that they made the connection. 
 
 Over the next few years Platts-Mills and his colleague Scott Commins screened more meat allergy patients and discovered that 80 percent reported being bitten by a tick. What’s more, they showed that tick bites led to a 20-fold increase in alpha-gal antibodies. Since ethics standards prevented them from attaching ticks to randomized groups of patients, this data was the best they could do to guess how meat allergy arises. Something in the tick’s saliva hijacks humans’ immune systems, red-flagging alpha-gal, and triggering the massive release of histamines whenever red meat is consumed. 
 
 Researchers are still trying to find what that something is. Commins has since moved to the University of North Carolina, where he’s injecting mice with lone star tick extracts to try to understand which molecules are setting off the alpha-gal bomb. It’s tricky: Tick saliva is packed with tons of bioactive compounds to help the parasite feed without detection. One of them might be an alpha-gal analogue—something similar-but-different-enough in shape that it sets off the human immune system. But it could also be a microbe—like a bacteria or virus—that triggers the response. Some have even suggested that residual proteins from the ticks’ earlier blood meals could be the culprit. 
 
 Whatever it is, allergy researchers will be paying attention. Because, as far as anyone can tell, alpha-gal syndrome seems to be the only allergy that affects all people, regardless of genetic makeup. “There’s something really special about this tick,” says Jeff Wilson, an asthma, allergy, and immunology fellow in Platts-Mills’ group. Usually a mix of genes and environmental factors combine to create allergies. But when it comes to the lone star tick it doesn’t matter if you’re predisposed or not. “Just a few bites and you can render anyone really, really allergic,” he says. 
 
 In the meantime, Platts-Mills, Commins, and Wilson are busy communicating the scale of the public health problem. Every day they check local news headlines to log new cases of catastrophic hamburger aversion, and spend hours on the phone gathering the latest intel from allergy clinics and academic centers around the country. They’re building the first real red meat allergy incidence map of the US—because state health departments aren’t required to report alpha-gal syndrome to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And it’s still rare enough outside the southeastern US that many doctors don’t correctly diagnose it. 
 
 Wilson is trying to get blood samples from all the new outbreaks, to figure out if the patients’ antibodies correspond to the saliva of lone star ticks or a different tick species. That will tell him if the increases in the allergy are the result of changing range patterns, or if other ticks have developed the capacity to rewire human immune systems in the same way. That information would also provide further clues to the mechanism itself. As for a cure? There’s not much science has to offer on that front, besides Epipens and veggie burgers. ||||| It’s any barbecue-lover’s worst nightmare: You go to bed after enjoying a juicy burger or a smoky rack of ribs, only to awaken, covered in sweat and hives. You’ve become allergic to meat. An increasing number of meat lovers in the United States and around the world have had this horrific experience in recent years, and it’s all because of a tiny parasite. 
 
 The culprit, the Lone Star Tick, spreads this potentially life-threatening allergy through its bites. Researchers don’t know exactly how the tick spreads the allergy, but they have identified which component of meat causes the allergic reaction. Mammal meat — pork and beef — contains a sugar called galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose (alpha-gal for short), and in people with the allergy, alpha-gal triggers an immune response that includes a massive release of histamines, much like your body would respond to other allergies. 
 
 Wired reported that in 2004, University of Virginia immunologist Thomas Platts-Mills, Ph.D., identified the alpha-gal connection after examining blood work from people that experienced strange reactions not to meat but to a cancer drug called cetuximab. People in the southeastern U.S., they found, were 10 times more likely to be allergic to this effective cancer drug. Further investigation showed that the region was also home to people with meat allergies. Since cetuximab and mammal meat both contain alpha-gal, and the affected people’s blood contained alpha-gal antibodies, the researchers hypothesized that the sugar was behind the allergy. 
 
 Most scientists agree that allergies occur when a foreign allergen — like alpha-gal — is mistakenly marked as an invader by the antibodies of the body’s immune system, which then releases chemical weapons to destroy it. One of those weapons is histamine, which triggers the inflammation necessary to deal with the allergen — but also causes the rest of your body to swell up, as well. 
 
 Since cases of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, which is spread by the Lone Star Tick, also arise in the same southeastern region, researchers are pretty sure that it’s the tick bites that are causing the allergies to meat and cetuximab. While the details of the allergy-spreading mechanism have yet to be understood, they’re likely involved in priming the body’s immune system to react badly to alpha-gal invasions. 
 
 As far as scientists know, this condition is lifelong. Unfortunately, the reaction is life-threatening, too, as anaphylaxis can cause a person’s airway to swell shut. 
 
 These cases have previously occurred mostly in the southern, southeastern, and central U.S., reports of new meat allergies have surfaced in the northeast, including Pennsylvania and New York. It’s unclear whether this means that the tick’s range is spreading or whether the ability to confer this allergy has spread to other tick species. 
 
 Original Could Kratom Solve the Opioid Crisis? 
 
 If you want to avoid developing this allergy, take basic precautions when going out in the woods or high grass. Check yourself thoroughly when you get home, especially in your body’s folds and near waistbands or elastic parts of clothes. And if you experience sweating, itching, or difficulty breathing a few hours after you eat meat, seek immediate medical attention. ||||| Rick Ostfeld lives in deep in the heart of Lyme disease country. An ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, Ostfeld has been studying the ticks that transmit Lyme to humans for decades. These days, he’s busier than ever.1 
 
 Around the world, diseases spread by ticks are on the rise. Reported cases of Lyme, the most common US tick-borne illness, have quadrupled since the 1990s. Other life-threatening infections like anaplasmosis, babesiosis, and Rocky Mountain spotted fever are increasing in incidence even more quickly than Lyme. Meat allergies caused by tick bites have skyrocketed from a few dozen a decade ago to more than 5,000 in the US alone, according to experts. And new tick-borne pathogens are emerging at a troubling clip; since 2004, seven new viruses and bugs transmitted through tick bite have shown up in humans in the US. 
 
 CDC 
 
 Scientists don’t know exactly which combination of factors—shifting climate patterns, human sprawl, deforestation—is leading to more ticks in more places. But there’s no denying the recent population explosion, especially of the species that carries Lyme disease: the black-legged tick. “Whole new communities are being engulfed by this tick every year,” says Ostfeld. “And that means more people getting sick.” 
 
 Tick science, surveillance, and management efforts have so far not kept pace. But the country’s increasingly dire tick-borne disease burden has begun to galvanize a groundswell of research interest and funding. 
 
 In 1942, Congress established the CDC specifically to prevent malaria, a public health crisis spreading through mosquitoes. Which is why many US states and counties today still have active surveillance programs for skeeters. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses data from these government entities to regularly update distribution maps, track emerging threats (like Zika), and coordinate control efforts. No such system exists for ticks. 
 
 Public health departments are required to report back to the CDC on Lyme and six other tick-borne infections. Those cases combined with county-level surveys and some published academic studies make up the bulk of what the agency knows about national tick distribution. But this data, patchy and stuck in time, doesn’t do a lot to help public health officials on the ground. “We’ve got national maps, but we don’t have detailed local information about where the worst areas for ticks are located,” says Ben Beard, chief of the CDC’s bacterial diseases branch in the division of vector-borne diseases. “The reason for that is there has never been public funding to support systematic tick surveillance efforts.” 
 
 That’s something Beard is trying to change. He says the CDC is currently in the process of organizing a nationwide surveillance program, which could launch within the year. It will pull data collected by state health departments and the CDC’s five regional centers about tick prevalence and the pathogens they’re carrying to build a better picture of where outbreaks and hot spots are developing, especially on the expanding edge of tick populations. 
 
 The CDC is also a few years into a massive nationwide study it’s conducting with the Mayo Clinic, which will eventually enroll 30,000 people who’ve been bitten by ticks. Each one will be tested for known tick diseases, and next-generation sequencing conducted at CDC will screen for any other pathogens that might be present. Together with patient data, it should provide a more detailed picture of exactly what’s out there. 
 
 Together, these efforts are helping to change the way people and government agencies think about ticks as a public health threat. “Responsibility for tick control has always fallen to individuals and homeowners,” says Beard. “It’s not been seen as an official civic duty, but we think it’s time whole communities got engaged. And getting better tick surveillance data will help us define risk for these communities in areas where people aren’t used to looking for tick-borne diseases.” 
 
 The trouble is that scientists also know very little about which interventions actually reduce those risks. “There’s no shortage of products to control ticks,” says Ostfeld. “But it’s never been demonstrated that they do a good enough job, deployed in the right places, to prevent any cases of tick-borne disease.” In a double-blind trial published in 2016, CDC researchers treated some yards with insecticides and others with a placebo. The treated yards knocked back tick numbers by 63 percent, but families living in the treated homes were still just as likely to be diagnosed with Lyme. 
 
 Ostfeld and his wife and research partner Felicia Keesing are in the middle of a four-year study to evaluate the efficacy of two tick-control methods in their home territory of Dutchess County, an area with one of the country’s highest rates of Lyme disease. It’s a private-public partnership between their academic institutions, the CDC, and the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Foundation, which provided a $5 million grant. 
 
 Ostfeld and Keesing are blanketing entire neighborhoods in either a natural fungus-based spray or tick boxes, or both. The tick boxes attract small mammal hosts, which get a splash of tick-killing chemicals when they venture inside. They check with all the human participants every two weeks for 10 months of the year to see if anyone’s gotten sick. By the end of 2020 the study should be able to tell them how well these methods, used together or separately on a neighborhood-wide scale, can reduce the risk of Lyme. 
 
 “If we get a definitive answer that these work the next task would be to figure out how to make such a program more broadly available. Who’s going to pay for it, who’s going to coordinate it?” says Ostfeld. “If it doesn’t work then perhaps the conclusion is maybe environmental control just can’t be done.” 
 
 In that case, people would be stuck with pretty much the same options they have today: protective clothing, repellants, and daily partner tick-checks. It’s better than nothing. But with more and more people getting sick, the US will need better solutions soon. 
 
 1Correction appended, 7/13/18, 3:30 EDT: The original version of this story improperly relied on information from this Nature story without attribution. The opening has been updated to reflect original reporting. 
 
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– Ticks are out in force this year, and there's one species in particular you should watch out for if you'd ever like to eat meat again. Experts say the lone star tick appears to be spreading from its home base in the southeastern US. Whereas other ticks can spread ailments such as Lyme disease, the lone star tick is bothersome because it is believed to trigger a potentially life-threatening and apparently lifelong meat allergy with its bite. The tick doesn't technically make people allergic to meat, but rather to a sugar molecule found in red meat known as alpha-gal. This alpha-gal allergy has typically been limited to the southeastern US, where the lone star tick is prevalent, but no more, reports Wired. Cases—in which the consumption of meat can result in hives, difficulty breathing, or death—have been reported in Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and New York, per Inverse. Long Island has seen at least 100 cases in the last year. Researchers suspect the spread of the allergy coincides with the spread of lone star ticks, though it's also possible that other ticks are responsible. Either way, "the nuisance level [for lone star ticks] is much higher than the black-legged tick," an expert tells the Weston Forum. "It is aggressive and very abundant." Researchers are currently studying the effect of a lone star tick bite on mice to determine why it triggers the allergy. (A toddler died after a tick bite.)