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A tiny tick might be to blame for a rash of red meat allergies across the United States, researchers say. And the latest study suggests grill-loving kids are just as vulnerable as their grown-up counterparts.
"Nearly 50 percent of the kids in our study ended up in the emergency department," said study author Dr. Scott Commins, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. "Age doesn't seem to really matter in terms of the severity of the reaction."
Commins and colleagues studied 51 kids who had reactions, ranging from rashes to anaphylactic shock, to mammalian meat. And like adults with the bizarre meat allergy, they all had a history of bites from Amblyomma americanum, better known as the lone star tick.
"We were surprised by how many kids were having reactions when we started looking in pediatric clinics for it," said Commins, who first linkedthe tick to meat allergies in 2009. He believes the bug's saliva can seep into the bite wound, somehow triggering an allergy agonizing enough to convert lifelong carnivores into wary vegetarians.
"People will eat beef, and then anywhere from three to six hours later start having a reaction, anything from hives to full-blown anaphylactic shock," he said. "And most people want to avoid having the reaction, so they try to stay away from the food that triggers it."
Most of the kids in the study developed a rash at the site of the tick bite before reacting to red meat, and all but six of them also tested positive for alpha-gal antibodies -- blood proteins that react to a sugar found in meat. But Commins said it's tough to make a definitive link between the tick and the allergy.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/meat-allergy-kids-tied-tick-bites/story?id=19265740#.UaWOGEA3sRQ
