(NAFB) Recent online speculation said that this year’s tick season has been a challenging one for livestock and human beings. Dr. Jonathan Cammack, an entomologist with Oklahoma State University, talked about this year’s tick season.
“That does seem to be the consensus, but I do want to start us off by addressing that. So, it’s really hard for us to say, ‘Oh, it’s going to be a bad year for ticks, or even that it is a bad year for ticks, because for the development of most of our native species of ticks, it takes them two, maybe even three years, depending on the species, to actually complete their development from the time that female tick lays her eggs, you know, in the late summer, and then they progress through their successive life stages over the course of the next two to three years.’ So, really, we can’t say, ‘Oh, we had a good hard freeze; we’re not going to have any ticks this year, ‘ because a lot of times, we’re wanting to know what kind of localized weather patterns were like two years ago, or even three years ago. So, to really say that you know weather is having an impact on tick populations, we unfortunately can’t.”
She said the central parts of the country are dealing with the Lone Star Tick, which can cause something called alpha gal syndrome when it bites.
“When any blood-feeding organism, whether it’s a tick or a mosquito or some of our other blood-feeding flies, whenever they bite to take that blood meal, they don’t just stick their mouthparts in you and start drinking your blood. For example, when they stick their mouthparts in, they also have saliva that they produce that they inject into that host, and that saliva serves several purposes. It provides a little bit of an anesthetic. That way, we don’t feel the bite, and it also modifies those blood vessels that they’ve pierced, so that the blood doesn’t coagulate. That way, they can actually drink that blood that they’re trying to take on.”
Alpha Gal is more of an allergic reaction than an actual disease.
“Like in the case of a lot of our blood-feeding organisms, like ticks and mosquitoes, if they have a pathogen present in their salivary glands, they also inject that pathogen. Alpha gal syndrome is a little bit different. It’s not a pathogen. It’s an allergic reaction that we actually have. So, ticks, such as the lone star tick, have been shown to have this sugar molecule. The shortened name of it is alpha gal. They have this sugar molecule present in their saliva. We don’t know if it’s naturally there, or if they pick it up from feeding on a cow for example, at some point in their life. But when they blood-feed on us, and they inject that saliva, some of this sugar molecule gets essentially, you know, injected into our bloodstream.”
He said Alpha Gal began to pick up around 2010. Cammack talked about the symptoms.
When you get bit by a Lone Star tick, after it injects that saliva into you, and it takes its blood meal, and either you pull it off or it drops off, over the course of the next two to maybe six months, your body is essentially reacting to the presence of that sugar molecule that your body essentially views as something foreign that shouldn’t be present. It kind of makes our immune systems go a little funny, and then, you know, after that two to six month point, if you eat a product or drink a product that has that alpha gal sugar in it, whether that’s a steak or you know maybe some cheese or ice cream, if you are reacting to that alpha gal sugar or have alpha gal syndrome, you eat that food, and usually two to maybe eight hours later, you start to have a reaction. That reaction is usually like an upset stomach, some gastrointestinal issues, and so a lot of times people think that they’ve got food poisoning. They wake up in the middle of the night with a terrible stomach ache, and the symptoms are going to essentially point to the equivalent of food poisoning. So, it’s something that most people, you know, might not even realize they’re having a reaction to.”
While some individuals have been shown to fully recover from Alpha-Gal Syndrome over time, Cammack cautioned that it remains a long and challenging process.
