In the summer of 2024, a 47-year-old airline pilot from New Jersey was camping with his wife and children. After eating a beef steak for dinner, he awoke in the middle of the night with stomach pains, along with other symptoms, including vomiting and diarrhea. In the end, his symptoms cleared up, and he decided against going to a doctor — even though, earlier in the summer, he had told his wife about the presence of 12 tick bites on his ankles. Whatever those ticks had done, the airline pilot concluded, it probably wasn’t life-threatening. Then, just two weeks later, the man attended a barbecue with his wife, where he ate a hamburger. Within four hours, he was unconscious on the floor of his bathroom. Paramedics tried to revive him, but it was too late. He was dead.
Initially, the death was recorded as “unexplained.” But the man’s doctor wasn’t happy with that explanation, so he sent his bloodwork to an allergy specialist, who quickly identified the cause. The airline pilot had contracted a tick-borne meat allergy known as alpha-gal syndrome, or AGS — which, until this particular case, wasn’t considered fatal. In fact, you’ll find plenty of scientific journal articles referring to AGS as a “nonfatal allergy.” But this 47-year-old airline pilot, for the first time in recorded history, had proven otherwise.


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