Written by Joe Ballenger
This question was very unique. We had a person in the AaE Facebook inbox reach out to us after she had been diagnosed with a meat allergy, most likely from a tick. After a conversation with her physician, she had wanted to know more about how ticks work. The physician wasn’t able to answer her questions about bugs, so she reached out to us.
The start of this week’s post: the Lone Star Tick, Amblyomma americanum. The females can be easily ID’d by the white spot on its back.
Unfortunately, since her query contains medical information, I’m not really comfortable posting it here. However, it’s important because tick-associated meat allergies allergies appear to be on the rise, and it’s a good idea for people to have a resource to understand what’s going on from the entomological side.
Researching for this post was an unexpected treat, as well. Normally, when I do a post, I have a pretty good idea of what I’m going to find. This was a rare post where, even though I knew the subject was interesting, the story ended up being a lot more interesting than I thought it would be.
What I feel makes this story really unique is how it bounces around a lot of disciplines. It starts with the first organ transplants, involves a lot of cancer biology, and then ends up talking about conservation practices in the Southern US.
