The allergy, called alpha-gal syndrome, came to light a little over a decade ago.
Interesting read. A few years ago I developed, seemingly overnight, an intolerance for red meat. Which sucked cause I really like it. But I developed it while working in the arctic, where there are no ticks (but like trillions of other biting insects). Doctors just did the usual rotation of antibiotics and then said IBS and patted themselves on the back. It was a terrible cop-out, but when living in the arctic you don’t get much choice for doctors. Over time the problem largely tapered off and I’m no longer a firehose an hour after eating meat. I feel for anyone who gets this.
I’m hoping that AI really helps within the field of medicine. Doctors cannot be expected to know every possible cause of every illness – they’re human after all. But I’m hoping that the weird stuff can be detected and at least diagnosed properly.
I’m so mad at Elizabeth Holmes. Any startup in this space will face such an uphill battle.
you should see what the eczema community put up with. Essentially it’s a community of just talking each other out of committing suicide because of how much pain they live with every day and the entire medical industry has failed them so miserably by dismissing them.
“Try the elimination diet” is the best they are given with absolutely no “why” or extension to find a better solution to allergies than either avoid the triggers (if you’re even lucky enough to find out what they are) or try a life threatening injection if your allergy gets severe.
Then you have the celiac community and what they have to put up with doctors: “eat gluten for 3 weeks without killing yourself so I can diagnose that you actually are intolerant to gluten”. The community has lovingly referred to this now as “the gluten challenge”…… which the medical community went as far as to take offence to the name. I wish empathy was taught as part of the curriculum for being a doctor.
I work in drug development, and have done a lot of work in topical drug development, specifically for skin diseases. Psoriasis gets most of the attention, but there’s a lot of work being done on other skin diseases, as well
“Eczema” is kind of a catch-all term for a group of diseases, which is one of the reasons treatment is so difficult. One kind is often mistaken for (or even indistinguishable from) another. The most common, though, is atopic dermatitis (which is hilarious when you look up the etymology).
So that said… Have you tried JAK inhibitors? Ruxolitinib is one of the best ones, formulated as a cream called Opzelura. It’s at least good for flare ups.
Unfortunately, there aren’t really any good drugs for preventing it. If you want company on that one, talk to the asthma community.
But… There is work being done. I’ve worked on it. I’ve had companies spend millions on the work. I haven’t seen anything very promising, but maybe you can take some comfort that there are frustrated scientists working on it, and pharma companies poised to take all of your money once something is found.
Eczema: For years I was dependent on prescription topical steroids. Then I tried giving up soap. I no longer suffer from eczema.
Briefly went back to using soap during COVID. Had a flare-up within a week. Haven’t used soap since, except in the rare occasion I have something specific on my hands (machine grease or something) I want to get off.
I had mysterious rash outbreaks for half a year… I shudder to imagine a lifetime of something worse.
I feel for you and anyone suffering with a meat allergy, but I dunno how much I’d trust AI for any serious purposes after seeing the garbage it can spit out.
Seriously, I’ve managed to get AI to write me instructions on how to inflate a phone and how to shave alligator hair. Rather that say “I’m sorry, that doesn’t make any sense, but here are some related topics”, instead it literally wrote out actual instructions for that nonsense LOL!
So yeah, I have no reason to trust AI for anything serious, it’s about an ignorant joke of a language model is all it really adds up to.
That’s specifically for a LLM which would probably not be the best AI base for medical uses.
People still don’t understand that AI is an all encompassing term like “tool” and not a single thing.
Just like we use thousands of vastly different and specialized tools, in a decade we’ll be surrounded by medical AI, engineering AI, accounting AI, design AI, research AI, life coaching AI, etc.
Right now we have a few LLMs and generative AIs, but that’s like having a pen and a spray gun.
Of course you wouldn’t ask any of them for a medical diagnosis.
In a use case like this, AI would be less about a final diagnose and more about getting the doctor or patient pointed in the right direction, especially with rare cases that few doctors are aware of. You no longer need to visit a hundred specialists in the hope of finding the one person who’s seen something similar to your case before.
Agree in this case AI is just WebMD symptom checker but with the ability to take in infinite data points and narrow it down with prompting questions and hopefully being able to upload images for further diagnosis.
Yeah, I’m not talking about a language model AI. But rather something like the stuff the insurance companies are using to assess risk – they take a lot of data in and cluster them together. Humans are sometimes really bad at recognizing patterns if you don’t have enough data. A pattern that goes: “oh, all these people in this region with this specific digestive problem spatially maps to this insect” is the sort of thing ML should be good at. But where it will be really good is in turning proteins into diagnosis: “if this protein is detected in the blood in an general scan, combined with symptoms, then diagnose X” – right now you only get tested for the things the doctor orders. Even more promising yet: with enough data, the AI should figure out which proteins actually do specific functions in the body, which will advance the research side (see, for example, Alphafold).
Pattern recognition is something modern techniques are very good at.
ChatGPT isn’t that. It also isn’t intelligent and doesn’t know anything. It’s basically a jacked up parrot blindly throwing words together.
I’ve never been to the Arctic but the same thing happened to me. I don’t think I was bitten by a tick but all of a sudden I started getting sick after eating red meat. Cutting it out of my diet fixed that issue. It’s been about 1.5 years since then and I’ve cut all meat out of my diet. It’s nice having a healthy digestive cycle but there are some things I miss and the plant based meat alternatives don’t always do it for me.
Not to belittle anyone who unfortunately had been afflicted by this… But, almost like nature is trying to reduce our Agri meat demand.
They’re just saving the earth from meat-induced CO2 emissions. One bite at a time.
Lone Star tick borne disease, geographical map of case data included in the article. Ars reporting is solid and just detailed enough, IMO.
Good. There should be a tick making people allergic to any meat. Would help people finally get over themselves and be vegan.
While I agree wholeheartedly that the world needs to cut down on meat consumption, I do NOT agree with forcing it on somebody involuntarily. In some places, especially some parts of the US, cheap meat is often the only way for people to survive, and they do not have access to all the non-meat products they would need to completely replace every nutrient.
Being successfully vegan and maintaining health is a privileged thing in the US. Our food economy is centered on meats, salt, sugars, and fats which are cheaply available everywhere.
Legumes, beans, veggies are always more affordable than meat. Cheap meat is generally considered to be bad for your health - at least in Europe, probably the same over in the US. Beans, rice, some veggies as a garnish go a long way, are super healthy and balanced, and are cheap to boot.
It really isn’t about privilege. It’s just about having your priorities straight. If you don’t care about animal welfare, well fine - no point in trying to force something on you because it’s usually a lost cause anyway. But people going about their day claiming they’re “animal lovers” and could never hurt an animal but then being omnis or vegetarians are just straight up hypocrites.
Change is hard. Being told you’re wrong about something or doing something immoral that you’ve grown up being told is fine is hard. But some people just need to be faced with the cruel, abusive, torturous, deadly reality that is animal AG. They won’t know the truth any other way.
I have a labor intensive contracting job. I also have a very high metabolism and am skinny as a rail. I cannot afford the 10 bags of beans or rice a day I would need to maintain at least 3000-3500 calories a day. If I tried that, I would literally die. I’ve done it before for a year. A whole year of weakness and sickness and extreme weight loss, and I couldn’t tolerate it anymore. I get bulk things like cheap Costco boxes of hamburger patties and stuff like that, which I CAN afford. I am well aware of animal suffering. You don’t have to tell me again and again that my existence is fucked up, because I know.
In the US, fresh veggies are more expensive than energy-dense fatty proteins.
What the heck are you even talking about right now?
You don’t think you could hit your macros with lentils? High protein, high fiber, calories for days. Throw in something like coconut oil and you’re gold. I only discovered lentils in the last few years since, yeah they don’t sound appetizing and are considered “poor people” food. Turns out they are great for you, delicious, cheap, and full of protein. I’m just mad it took me so long to find out about them.
Look - you love meat. It’s easy. We get it. But lets not pretend you couldn’t get the equivalent nutrition from other sources.
Thanks for chiming in. Appreciate it.
You do you, dude. There’s a bunch of vegan lifters who easily manage 3000cal a day and disprove your theory. I’m sure they’re not spending a fortune on food.
If I can manage a vegan diet with a minimum wage job with 20h/week (800-1000€ per month), I’m pretty sure you should too. But again, I don’t live in the US and don’t know the prices over there.
I have a buddy doing his Master’s in Arizona, moved from Ghana, who manages fine with veganism. Might be state-dependent, I guess.
Nobody with any sense will argue with you that veganism isn’t a better and morally superior diet than meat, but trying to push this as an individual responsibility issue is doomed to failure.
It’s the same problem as convincing people to change their diets to lose weight or be healthier in general - it’s hard to get people to be satisfied with an entirely different diet than what they’re used to and you won’t guilt them into it. The vegetable-based meat alternatives that are being produced are the best possible way to wean people onto vegan diets, but the companies that are producing them care more about profiteering than trying to undercut meat costs despite the touted savings in production costs.
Seriously trying to get people onto more vegan diets should involve way less pressure on individuals and more concerted effort on eliminating government meat subsidies and holding businesses in the vegetarian/meat alternative space to account for being more concerned with profitability than their “mission”.
Unless the subject is being brought up, nothing’s gonna change at all. Food has become such a taboo subject that it’s just not being talked about especially if it involves uncomfortable truths like animal AG.
Change doesn’t happen on its own. It needs momentum, it needs people talking about it, it needs people arguing about the pros and cons. Jack’s gonna change if we don’t talk about it and participate in discussions and arguments.
If even one person rethinks their actions upon reading one of my comments, I’m content. But shushing people and not letting them even mention the subject at all is stupid imo. And sometimes it needs some convincing from our side to get the message across.
I’m not telling anyone what to do. I’m not guilt tripping anyone. I’m just stating facts that anyone who consumes animal products should know of. It’s up to you make it happen.
Considering the state of the world and its impending doom in light of the climate catastrophe, the least we can do is go vegan. It’s what takes the least amount of politics to make at least somewhat of an impact. Economies of scale, supply and demand and what not. But sure - “no pressure”.
I’m not saying no pressure. I’m saying you’re applying the pressure in the wrong place. You will not succeed at an individual level. You need to push for systemic change if you’re serious about it. Electric car adoption isn’t increasing because individuals are getting greener - economic incentives are aligning to make it a better decision. Veganism will have to follow the same path, and the longer it takes to start addressing the real things that will make a difference, the longer the problem will continue.
You want an example of effective action? Start by pushing politicians in your country to end or reduce government subsidies for meat production that artificially keep prices low. Push candidates for office to start initiatives that will build future successes, like encouraging introduction of meat alternatives in school lunches and nutritional programs so you’re building an educational foundation for the future instead of relying on guilt, shame, and bullying. Pressure producers of successful vegan food products to stop relying on the willingness of the current vegan community to overpay for products and encourage them to lower prices to competitive levels as a moral imperative.
These are all things that will make a real difference in the short and long term. Arguing on the internet with individuals won’t.
20 hrs a week would be doable. But not my current of 50-60 hours of often hot, backbreaking labor dragging ladders and tools and equipment up into the ceiling and back all day.
It’s a secret plot by vegans. /s
I knew it!
Obviously big vegan has injected ticks with it and then released them into the population. It’s all a ploy to get us to stop eating meat. We must resist and eat all the meat we can, while we can.
Went to a farmers market in rural Missouri and heard about this from a chicken farmer. His business is up because of that
If you go camping frequently you’ve probably noticed that more people are going outside than ever before.
Among newer hikers and campers I’ve noticed that insect repellent just gets treated like sunscreen: people kind of ignore it or spray it on the obvious spots and don’t bother with the rest.
Also, don’t even get me started on those “all natural” insect repellents.
It’s really just education. No one takes it seriously.
My father had this. There were a lot of things that he had to be careful about eating. Lots of products that you wouldn’t think would have animal ingredients in them set him off.
