Mammalian-meat allergy
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Science
germtheory — 5 years ago(December 08, 2020 05:39 PM)
Peter Moore woke up in the middle of the night with his throat so tight he struggled to breathe, his torso covered with huge red welts, and no idea why. Earlier that evening in June 2001, Moore — then a 25-year-old teacher living in a coastal suburb of Sydney, Australia — had eaten pork spare ribs at a neighbour’s house, then gone to bed content and in perfect health. Until he woke in a panic.
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Further analysis revealed the exact culprit: a sugar called galactose-α-1,3-galactose, or α-gal. Many mammals produce α-gal, but humans and some other primates do not, having lost the ability to do so around 28 million years ago. This is a major barrier to transplantation of organs between animals and humans, because humans produce substantial quantities of natural antibodies against α-gal. Cetuximab was produced using a mouse cell line, which was the source of the α-gal.
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Then came the second breakthrough. In 2009, Commins and his colleagues found that 24 patients at the University of Virginia allergy clinic in Charlottesville had IgE antibodies against α-gal — and all of them had shown allergic reactions within three to six hours of eating mammalian meat. Just a few months later, van Nunen and her colleagues published a paper on the association between mammalian-meat allergy and tick bites3, and the pieces of this food-allergy puzzle finally fell into place. In the southeastern United States, just as in Sydney, a tick was the key.
“The tick is altering us,” van Nunen says. When a tick bites a person, it introduces α-gal to the human immune system, which in some people leads to the development of an allergy to mammalian meat products. Exactly how this happens, however, is still shrouded in mystery.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02783-7
Vegans should figure out how to weaponize this. Might just lead to more chickens and fish dying but maybe there are allergies for those too.