This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.
Looking back at her birthday party five years ago, Myfanwy Webb is filled with regret, remembering what she sees as a missed opportunity to save her son's life. Hours after a celebratory lunch, Jeremy began having difficulty breathing. His parents called an ambulance. At the hospital, doctors suspected a meat allergy but blamed the episode on his asthma. He was sent home the next day. Just over a year later, in June 2022, Jeremy died after eating a beef sausage on a camping trip with friends at a beach north of Sydney. The cause of death was initially recorded as asthma, but in February, after an inquest, a coroner ruled that the asthma attack and fatal anaphylaxis were triggered by tick-induced mammalian meat allergy (MMA), also known as alpha-gal syndrome. This is the first death in the world known to have been caused by MMA.
Diagnosed cases of MMA have steadily escalated since 2007, when an Australian doctor first discovered the allergy was linked to tick bites. Scientists warn that the condition, though easily prevented, can be unexpectedly triggered and pose a deadly threat. Webb had long suspected her son had a meat allergy, but it was never formally diagnosed. Symptoms of the allergy range from mild to severe, including skin rashes, swelling, stomach cramps, vomiting, and anaphylaxis. From around age 10, Jeremy suffered nausea after eating meat, or even occasionally after inhaling fumes from roast meat. Prof Sheryl van Nunen discovered the link between MMA and ticks almost 20 years ago after noticing a correlation in patients at her Sydney allergy clinic. Australia's east coast is one of the world's two MMA hotspots; the other is in the US. In Australia, MMA is caused by the bite of the eastern paralysis tick. After two tick bites, 50% of people develop antibodies to alpha-gal, a sugar molecule in the tick's saliva. After that, they have a 15 to 20% chance of becoming allergic to meat. "If only people knew what a tick could do," van Nunen says. Jeremy, who grew up surrounded by dense bushland north of Sydney, had been bitten by ticks since he was a small boy. It is not clear why the east coast is an MMA hotspot; in some areas there are more than 700 sufferers per 100,000 people. Dr Alex Gofton, a tick expert, says one hypothesis is that more people are coming into contact with ticks there. The rainy La Nina years between 2020 and 2023 favored tick proliferation, and the COVID pandemic pushed more people to move from cities into the bush. The high rate of diagnosis—a 22% increase every year since 2020—may also be fueled by increased awareness and testing. Gofton estimates there are more than 5,000 suspected MMA cases in Australia. Diagnosing a meat allergy can be difficult, as symptoms often develop at night, hours after eating, and for those with asthma, the two can be confused. Van Nunen describes it as "an anytime but not an every time allergy."