A 47-year-old airline pilot from New Jersey died from an allergic reaction to red meat caused by a tick bite, known as alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), the first recorded death of its kind, medical researchers said.
An expert group of allergists and immunologists from the University of Virginia School of Medicine reported the man's cause of death Wednesday in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice. Until then, it was a mystery.
According to researchers, the unidentified man, who had no significant medical history, became seriously ill after eating beef steak for dinner during a camping trip with his wife and children in the summer of 2024, experiencing severe abdominal pain, vomiting, and diarrhea.
The next morning, he felt well enough to go on a five-mile hike, but at the height of his illness, which lasted several hours, he told his wife that he thought he was “going to die.” The couple decided not to see a doctor.
Two weeks later, the two attended a barbecue in New Jersey, where the man ate a hamburger around 3 p.m. Afterwards, I returned home and spent an hour mowing the lawn. Around 7:20 p.m., after his wife left the house, the man went to the bathroom. About 10 minutes later, the son called his mother and said, “Dad is feeling sick again.''
Moments later, she found her father lying unresponsive on the bathroom floor in a pool of vomit. The son called 911 at 7:37 p.m. and began lifesaving measures.
Paramedics spent two hours trying to resuscitate the man, including transporting him to a hospital. He was pronounced dead at 10:22 p.m.
An autopsy concluded that his death was “sudden death of unknown cause.”
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Embarrassed by her husband's death, the wife asked her friend Dr. Erin McFeely, who has been a pediatrician for more than 20 years, to review the autopsy report. McFeely then contacted researchers in Virginia and allowed the coroner's office to send the postmortem blood to Virginia, the Journal article said.
His blood was tested in April 2025, and the results showed a significant amount of antibodies to alpha-gal, a sugar found in beef and other mammalian products, including tick saliva, suggesting a beef allergy.
Postmortem tryptase testing was also performed. Tryptase is an enzyme released during severe allergic reactions. His tryptase levels were very high, in the range normally seen in people who die from fatal anaphylaxis.
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“His level was 2,000. The highest level I've actually seen in a survivor is 100,” Dr. Thomas Platts Mills, an allergist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine who discovered alpha-gal syndrome and diagnosed the man's case, told NBC News.
When researchers asked her husband if he had ever been bitten by a tick, the wife said yes, but not in 2024. She added that earlier in the summer before her husband died, she received 12 or 13 “chigger” bites around her ankles, leaving small itchy bumps on her skin.
Chiggers are not mites, but the larvae of certain mites. In the eastern United States, what is often referred to as “chiggers” are often the larvae of the Lone Star tick, which “is known to bite humans and is an important source of sensitization to alpha-gal,” the magazine says.
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Researchers say this, combined with the fact that severe abdominal pain is not a commonly known symptom of anaphylaxis, means that neither the man nor his wife thought their illness was tick-related or caused by “anaphylaxis.'' They were unable to link either his bite or abdominal pain to the beef he had eaten hours before both reactions occurred.
“A post-mortem examination did not rule out anaphylaxis as a possible cause of death,” the researchers wrote.
The study also notes that more and more people in the United States are being exposed to Lone Star ticks, primarily due to the tick's northern range expansion and large numbers of deer in many states.
“The result is that many sensitized individuals are unaware of the fact that both larval 'chiggers' (a slang term for tick larvae, not ticks) and adult ticks can cause sensitization to alpha-gal,” the researchers wrote, adding that there is a need for better education of the public and health professionals about the risks and presence of AGS.
The researchers also warned in the article that alcohol consumption and exercise can increase the rate at which allergens are absorbed into the body, and that the New Jersey pilot had been exercising and drinking beer on the day of his death, according to the magazine.
In Canada, warm winters and mild temperatures are causing ticks to thrive in more areas of the country than ever before, increasing the risk of tick-borne diseases like Lyme disease.
The black-footed tick, which is responsible for most Lyme disease cases in Canada, is rapidly expanding its range and is now found in parts of the southern provinces. This epidemic is closely tied to climate change, which is forcing ticks to survive the winter and move into areas that were once too cold, putting more people and pets at risk.
There are more than 40 species of ticks in Canada, but the most common is the black-legged tick, also known as the deer tick, and their numbers are on the rise.
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— With files from Global News
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