#its like an allergic reaction. like if you get stung by bees too often and develop a bee sting allergy despite not being born with one | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

cupids-flight · 4 years

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Spooky Santa 2019 - Gift

Good afternoon! This is my Spooky Santa present - I was lucky enough to get @minibattlehero and they requested... basically anything! Unfortunately, I have the artistry skills of a brick through a windshield, so what I can offer my writing skills.

It’s one hundred percent Izuocha - and I hope you like it! It’s under the cut, as it’s somewhat longer than I expected.

Story Information:

Title: “🐝 To say there were too many bees was an understatement. 🐝” Pairing: Izu/Ocha Word Count: 2082

🐝 To say there were too many bees was an understatement. 🐝

It was not often that Ochako wished revenge on someone that didn’t have it as part of a greater goal, but it did happen. And – in her eyes – pranking her classes Secret Santa party with a box full of angry bees was taking things far too far. She didn’t know who had sent the cursed present but seeing the smirk on Monoma’s face at the sight of her many stings was enough in her mind.

She had stepped forward, about to give him a piece of her mind, when an angry force of nature sped forward with an anger that seemed unsuited on his frame; the green sparks flared over him. Whatever he was feeling, it was not going to be pleasant for Monoma.

🐝 🐝 🐝

It wasn’t so much a party as it was a gathering; the class coming together to exchange gifts; not unlike a Secret Santa, but for the most legendary of holidays. Halloween.

The names had been drawn, and the only rule for present purchasing was simple – not too expensive, and something spooky or related to the season.

Some of the presents had been oddly fitting – Mineta receiving a pumpkin that had been made to look like his head, while Tokoyami received a rather sizable book on eldritch mythos – and some had been... odder. Izuku receiving a full vampire costume (save that it was in magenta) and Shoto receiving a full campfire and smores kit. (Mina had gotten particularly defensive when he opened his present, leaving no one to doubt who had gotten Shoto in the draw.)

Everyone had switched presents and the party was winding down. Kirishima was the first to notice the elephant in the room; two final packages. One of them was clearly marked for Koji, but he had not been able to attend. The other was untagged and unadorned, lay in the remnants of the original gifts. It’s wrapping was a plain metallic gold, adding to the mystery.

Kirishima glanced around, before shrugging.

“Hey, anyone going to claim this present or should I open it?”

His classmates, having been roused from their merriment, turned their attention to the package. Jirou, taking the initiative, placed one of her ear jacks carefully against the box. Within a moment, she turned back towards her friends with a single eyebrow raised and an apprehensive look on her face.

“It’s buzzing. Whatever is in it, it’s buzzing.”

The reactions were mixed; Denki looked almost abashed (his mind having rapidly drifted toward the impure) while Shoto looked on with a stoic gaze, seemingly unfazed. He sighed, before walking towards the mystery present.

“I am going to open it. Does anyone object?”

Everyone looked on, curiosity now roused; even if there were misgivings, none would announce them. Izuku (in a case of extraordinarily good judgment) gently stepped back, pulling Ochako as he did.

Shoto opened the lid, and pandemonium ensued.

An unreasonable (almost improbable) number of bees poured from the box, having been freed from their prison; and to say that they were (as a collective) angry bees was an understatement. Their rage could only be surpassed by Bakugo; who to his credit had sprung into action, the sparks from his hands proving more than enough to send the bees flying off, desperately avoiding him.

🐝 🐝 🐝

Ochako was panicking; she was not a fan of bees in any capacity and being confronted with a frankly preposterous number of bees was – to her – far scarier than any threat posed by a villain. Izuku very quickly caught up on this, stepping forward; doing his best to shield her from the incessant buzzing.

It was just a shame that she had chosen today, of all days, to wear a shirt with a floral design. The bees were homing in on the promise of nectar from the flowers on her shirt, almost trying to swarm her.

The first sting went unnoticed by many, but they continued.

The bees, to their credit, weren’t trying to intentionally hurt anyone; but they were scared insects who were desperately trying to get out of the room. (All the windows had been rapidly opened, and they were pouring out of the windows.) In the excitement, no one was aware that the number of bees pouring from the box were vastly more than it could hold.

It all came to a sudden, sweltering stop when Torodoki, stung to hell and back and fed up with the entire situation, let loose a torrent of flame that incinerated any luckless bee in the area that was still flying, adding to the pile of dead bees on the ground. He also successfully singed a lot of hair, but most of them were accepting of this fact if it solved the bee problem.

Bakugo, naturally, was the first to start swearing.

🐝 🐝 🐝

Most people simply tuned out the unending stream of profanity emanating from the angry blond, instead focusing on the stings and the countless remains of bees.

Kirishima took a moment – sting-free, due to his hardening – to glance at his friends. Hakugure was somehow giving off an air of displeasure despite not saying a word nor having any capability for expression in any form. Mina was crying, Jirou carefully patting her on the arm avoiding the many stings laced across it. Ochako was nowhere to be found; nor was Izuku (which lead him to smile, mentally).

Denki was passed out on one of the couches – he had let loose an ill-advised burst of electricity to try and shock the bees, which had simply made them angrier.

He sighed, before sitting down himself, the quiet they found themselves in only disturbed by Bakugo’s profanity; he was still going and had not yet even managed to repeat himself. (Kirishima would privately note this as impressive, despite everything.)

🐝 🐝 🐝

Ochako hissed as the cool liquid splashed onto yet another sting, Izuku’s hand carefully on her shoulder as he applied it. She had been one of the worst off out of the stung; it was with no small measure of extraordinarily good sense that had Izuku quickly get her out of the room before the bees swarmed.

(He did wonder why no one else considered leaving the room and just allowing the bees to leave through the window; or why someone didn’t think of calling Koji and seeing if he could intervene.)

His face was contorted with concentration as he applied the final bit of anti-sting lotion he had, the final drips of the blue liquid leaving the bottle. He put on a cheerful face for Ochako, even as she looked up.

A cheerful face would not disguise the fact he was similarly covered in stings.

“That should do it.” A nod from the green-haired boy. “It’ll still hurt for a little bit, but they should go down soon.” His face turned grave for a second. “It’s really lucky none of us were allergic…”

Ochako looked up at him, thinking for a moment.

“Why did you not use any of the lotion on yourself, Deku?”

And hearing her voice say his name slammed into Izuku’s train of thought like a lead weight, throwing all other thoughts out of his mind. His crush on her was (to everyone but the pair) common knowledge, barring Ochako herself.

“I- I wanted to make sure you were taken care of.” He held up a depleted first aid kit, some of its contents long since consumed. “I only had a little bit left.” Ochako looked at him with a level gaze for just a moment, before sighing.

“…thank you.” Her voice was a bit more subdued, the cheerfulness that was often in her tone making its absence known. She seemed to shrink into herself at Izuku’s speech.

Izuku frowned a little at that, before standing up – ignoring the omnipresent discomfort from the bees – and offering a hand to Ochako. She looked up towards it, almost hesitant.

She took it.

🐝 🐝 🐝

They were walking down one of the many streets; having made a hasty exit from the ‘restarted’ gathering. The fact that dead bees now covered many surfaces (and the discomfort from stings sending many people to bed early) made it fruitless endeavour.

Izuku had bought Ochako an ice cream, but she still looked somewhat uneasy. Izuku, to his credit, had not forced the issue. He simply let her enjoy her ice cream in companionable silence, focusing as best as he could on his own.

(If he kept glancing to his right to catch a glimpse of her face, that was his business and his alone.)

The silence continued on, as the final touches of the day passed on leaving a starlit sky in its wake.

“Izuku-kun.”

Her voice was quiet; not as subdued but lacking the normal boundless enthusiasm she put into everything she did. Izuku turned his head, ice-cream long since finished, and looked at her.,

“Why did you jump in front of me when the box was opened?”

Izuku barely hesitated in answering, conviction in his voice.

“…because you looked like your worst nightmare had come true when the box opened. A-and…” A moment to pause, as Izuku considered his next words; whatever he said next would have to be poignant. (Or so it had been drummed into him, as a life lesson in talking to girls.)

“…well, I never want to see you look like that again if I can help it?” A nod, as he felt emboldened. “I fully believe in you as a hero, but everyone has something they don’t like… like… like bees.” His voice lowered a notch. “…I don’t like them either. They scare me.”

Ochako’s face seemed to shift at that admission, just a little.

“But… if it was anyone else, I’d have… I don’t know. Probably not jumped in front of a swarm of them.”

A moment passed between them, a moment that seemed to pass for an age.

Ochako spoke next, equally as quiet.

“…thank you. It… did make me happy, in a way, to see it was you who had jumped in front of them.” A soft smile, the ever-present blush enlightening her face.

This, once again, sent Izuku’s thought processes sideways, even as she continued to speak.

“It was really stupid. I had this whole plan to talk to you, and then I didn’t get a chance before the bees…”

A nod. Izuku did not want to consider the bees.

“…I was actually going to tell you something.”

This caught Izuku’s attention even as he was reeling from the unexpected turns of phrase she had used; his analytical brain desperately trying to figure out what she was going to say. It could have been anything, to him – an invite out with her and some friends, a question about homework-

“I like you, Izuku.”

-and his mental processes slammed to a complete stop for the third time that day. He watched down, nervous (and in a state of shock) as she took his hand, holding it in her own. It had been something he had often considered (alone, obviously, because he was not about to mention it in any way that Bakugo could find out) but he had long since cast the idea aside.

He – almost in autopilot – reaffirmed her grip, the tip of his finger making contact with one of her pads; she giggled, a little bit, at that. The small tremors in his hands, the callouses and marks from constant training and the sheer damage he had caused to them, all fading into the background under the simple touch; the gentle feeling of her hand pushing everything else aside.

He looked at her; gazed into her eyes for just a moment, before speaking. It was a simple sentence he said in return, but it held a lot of meaning.

To them both.

🐝 🐝 🐝

It was with little fanfare that Izuku, Monoma and (having followed along in a fret of concern) Ochako found themselves sitting in front of Aizawa, his gaze as level and tired as it ever was.

“What, precisely, led you to believe that using your quirk to intimidate Monoma was a good idea, Problem Child?”

A small nod from Izuku; a well-rehearsed answer.

“It was when he upset my girlfriend by sending our party a box of bees.”

And that caught everyone’s attention. It was back to their classmates within the hour.

#//Originally the 🐝's were centered #//But Tumblr wasn't having any of that.#[ BNHA RP Spooky Santa 2k19 ]#//I forgot to tag Mat before I went into HTML editing mode so I'll just tell him another way.#minibattlehero #//Sorry I couldn't make any graphics; I hope this brings a smile to you! :)

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soldrawss · 6 years

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Is it possible that you may or may not have some more headcanons about the duck cousins you want to share with us

I have so many freaking headcanons for these losers but hardly anytime to draw something for them so I’ll give y’all some randos from the shelf to pique your interest!

Donald: Hardly anyone outside the family knows that Don can play the guitar. And he’s actually really great at it too! But he can’t sing for shit which is sad cause his love for music is so strong!!! He knows he doesn’t have a great voice, so he often subjects his cousins to his loud and incredibly off-tune voice whenever they get on his nerves, like singing at the top of his lungs while he’s got them stuck in the car with him or early in the morning, he’ll fill the entire house with his echos as he belts it in the shower. However, he does have those tender moments where he’ll just start humming subconsciously while cooking or working on his truck and that’s when his cousins/sister will hang around him the most cause it’s nice and calming and rhythmic. He also doesn’t play the guitar often, so when he does break it out of its case, it’s a real treat that everyone can enjoy!

Della: Subconsciously, Della started growing her hair after her parent’s accident, and for a couple of years, it got pretty long. She didn’t mind it, but it wasn’t like she really enjoyed the hassle of dealing with it every day. Then, one week, 9 yo Fethry just bursts into the kitchen with the declaration that he wants to be a hairstylist when he grows up and needs someone to help him practice on. (It’s not uncommon for Fehtry to have a new obsession, they usually don’t last for longer than 2 weeks) Donald and Gladstone are IMMEDIATELY like, ‘NOPE, heck no, don’t get those scissors anywhere near my head’ which was really disheartening for Fehtry so Della just shrugs and is like ‘yo I volunteer as tribute’ cause it’s just hair and she doesn’t really mind getting her hair butchered if it means it’s out of her face and honestly like, how can she say no to a little excited Fethry like, that’s practically treason. And no matter how much Gladstone and Donald try to tell her she’s crazy for trusting Fehtry like that, she just goes along with it and plops down in a chair with a book and is like, ‘have at me Feth”. And Fethry is DELIGHTED. He works so hard and it takes about an hour for him to finish. The end result looked like he had taken a weed wacker and butchered her hair, making it choppy and uneven and pretty much a mess. Donald and Gladstone knew this would happen, but before they could get the chance to say anything, Della exclaims with glee because SHE LOVES THE LOOK. It fits her so well and she honestly doesn’t care so long as it is short and out of her way, so she gives the nervous Fethry a giant hug and a kiss to the forehead and even now, years later after Fehtry stopped wanting to be a hairstylist, he’s the only one Della will go to to get her hair cut. And it’s sort of like a nice bonding experience for them.

Gladstone: Everyone has chores on the farm, but Gladstone managed to be completely rubbish at everything that has ever been assigned to him (he really didn’t even try to do chores properly) so finally, Granny assigned him to simply water her garden every morning. Much to the surprise of everyone, he’s actually pretty great at gardening and taking care of the few flowers and personal crops granny has in there. He complains and says that his luck naturally gives him a green thumb, but only because he actually likes the kinda of work that goes into taking care of plants and does not want anyone to know or they might try to force him to do other things. So the garden basically became Gladstone’s safe domain and is often where he goes to chill out or to blow off steam and clear his mind after a spat with Donald. Hardly anyone but Gladdy goes in there, aside from granny to collect fresh ingredients for meals or the occasional Fethry who wanders in sometimes just to hang with Gladstone and keep him company on those particular days when Gladdy retreats to the dark parts of his mind and stays cooped up in the garden well into the late afternoon and try to lull him back out.

Fethry: He’s extremely allergic to bees. Like, anaphylactic shock, kinda extreme. He’s only ever been stung twice, and both times were incredibly scary and very much life-threatening. The first time was when he was 3, and he was at a picnic with his whole family. No one knew he was allergic to bee’s, but it was the scariest thing anyone of them had experienced, especially for Fethry’s parents. Luckily, Goostave Gander (Gladstone’s dad) came to the rescue with his own EpiPen, which he carries around everywhere (at the insistence of Daphne) because of his severe allergic reaction to shellfish. He’s since gotten an EpiPen of his own that he’s supposed to take with him everywhere, but due to his go with the flow and forgetful nature, his cousin’s usually keep one on them just in case he forgets his. Which is usually all the time. The second time it happened was on one of their yearly cousin excursions when Fethry was 14 and they went camping way up in the woods. Fethry had accidentally wandered from camp in order to explore a little of the area and got himself trapped on a ledge surrounded by a wild hornet’s nest, his EpiPen long forgotten in his backpack at the campsite. Luckily they had found him before the Hornets got too agitated, Donald climbing down after him and wrapping him in his and Gladstones jackets to try and cover up as much exposed skin/feathers as possible. However, on their way back up, one got Fethry right in the back on the neck, almost causing him to fall. Donald thankfully caught him and hoisted him back up, but the damage was done and Fethry’s throat began closing up and his skin began to swell. The trio had hardly been more afraid in their entire lives than they were in that moment as they rushed back to the campsite. Thankfully, again, they made it just in time as Gladstone reached the backpack first and plunged the EpiPen into Fethry’s thigh. Not wanted to risk anything, they packed up the car and raced to the hospital just to make sure. Fethry felt so bad about ruining their yearly cousins trip, but all of them refused to accept his apologies because he had nothing to be sorry about. Who cares if they missed out on a dumb trip. He was something far more precious they would have missed if they had lost him.

#TCS #Teenage Cousin Shenanigans #Long post sorry #but some good good headcannons for y'all #i hope you enjoy #i've been thinking about these particular ones for awhile now #but I have about a billion more that I have #i just love them so much #and love cultivating their personalities and flushing out their characteristics as teens like #ajs;aljdf;adhf #its so fun #thank you for all the great asks guys #keep em coming

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poop4u · 4 years

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Why is My Dog Collapsing? 6 Reasons for Sudden Collapse

#Poop4U

The post Why is My Dog Collapsing? 6 Reasons for Sudden Collapse by Dr. Catherine Ashe appeared first on Dogster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren't considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Dogster.com.

It can be hard sometimes to tell when our dogs are having a true emergency, but when a dog collapses, it is always serious! Hopefully this won’t happen to your canine friend, but it’s important to be prepared if your dog suddenly collapses.

If your dog is breathing and responsive

First, don’t panic. If your dog is breathing and responsive, carefully move him to your vehicle and head for your nearest emergency veterinary clinic. Call ahead so the emergency staff will be expecting you.

When you arrive, your dog should be immediately triaged. This will include the veterinary staff taking vitals and starting stabilization.This might include an IV catheter and oxygen, depending on the underlying cause.

While this is happening, try to think about anything unusual that might have led to this incident. Was your dog playing in the heat? Were there insects around? Might your dog have been exposed to any toxins? These are questions the veterinarian will ask to try to determine the cause of your dog’s illness.

Photo: Getty Images

If your dog isn’t responsive

If your dog appears unresponsive and apneic (not breathing), begin CPR. Try to alert someone nearby to find assistance. The most important part of CPR is chest compressions.

Place the palm of one hand on the back of the other, position over the heart and begin to press down rhythmically.

The rate should be about 120 beats per minute (about the pace of the song Stayin’ Alive by the Bee Gees).

Push so the chest compresses about half of its width.

After 60 compressions, hold your dog’s snout closed and give a breath into the nostrils, then resume compressions.

When you are able, get veterinary care immediately.

Causes of dog collapse

There are many possible reasons for a dog to collapse, and they vary by age and breed, as well as the time of year.

To prevent your dog collapsing from heatstroke, make sure cool water is always available. Photo: Getty Images

1. Heatstroke can occur during hot months secondary to overexertion and dehydration. Dogs pant to cool themselves. Excessive panting is the earliest sign of overheating. Avoiding vigorous exercise and making sure cool water is always available to your canine can help prevent this. Take walks in the early morning and at twilight to avoid the hottest part of the day.

Dogs can have severe allergic reactions just like humans. Signs include vomiting, diarrhea and collapse. Photo: Getty Images

2. Anaphylaxis can happen in dogs, just as in humans. Bees, wasps and other insects are often to blame, even though you may not actually see your dog get stung. Along with collapse, other signs may include vomiting and diarrhea.

3. Syncope is collapse caused by heart disease. This happens suddenly and can last for a few seconds to a minute or more. Afterward, your dog may act as if nothing happened, but a veterinary visit is still essential.

4. Seizures can cause unexpected collapse. This is usually accompanied by other symptoms such as paddling, vocalizing, urination and defecation. The hallmark of a seizure is unconsciousness. During a true seizure, your dog will not respond to stimulus. Recovery afterward can be slow, and your dog’s behavior may be very abnormal. This is called the postictal phase.

Blue-green algae (Cyanobacteria) can produce toxins that can cause sudden collapse in dogs who drink or swim in this type of contaminated water. Photo: Getty Images

5. Toxins are many. Some that could cause a sudden collapse episode include blue-green algae, found in stagnant water; xylitol, a common sweetener that causes a sudden, dangerous drop in blood sugar; and rat poisons such as bromethalin, a neurotoxin.

6. Internal hemorrhaging might seem like a strange cause for sudden collapse, but it is all too common. Senior dogs, especially breeds like the Golden Retriever, are prone to developing a silently growing cancer of the heart, liver and spleen. There may be no outward signs until the tumor becomes too large and ruptures. This acute rupture leads to internal bleeding and collapse. The internal bleeding can be within the abdomen or within the sac around the heart (pericardium).

So remember, if your dog collapses, it is always serious and always time to take your pup to the veterinarian, even if he recovers. Note what has happened before your dog collapses, so your veterinarian can determine if one of the six culprits is the cause and start appropriate treatment.

Poop4U Blog via www.Poop4U.com Dr. Catherine Ashe, Khareem Sudlow

#cute dog #dogs of tumblr #puppy doggo #doglover #doggrooming #my doggo #dogmeme #poop4u #blog

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girlaboutcampus · 7 years

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(Illustration- Jim Kay)

Children Grieve Too // Thoughts on A Monster Calls

The bell rang at the end of fourth period English. I shrug on my jacket and knock my notebooks into my bag and am about to head for lunch when-

“Ouch!”

It turns out that a wasp had been hiding in the folds of my friend’s winter coat for the whole double period. Over the next day her hand has swollen up to twice the size. I, on the other hand, have never been stung. Not by a bee, not by a wasp. It seems unlikely that I’ll manage to go my whole life without getting stung- going almost twenty-one years feels quite impressive. The difference, however, between myself and my friend is that she now knows that she’s allergic to wasp stings- for all I know I could be too. But I don’t. I don’t know. The thought makes me a little bit antsy.

This is a very long-winded way of saying that there’s something valuable in knowing what you can survive. Patrick Ness’s novel A Monster Calls opens with a young boy, Conor, having a nightmare about his mother falling into a deep, dark pit. As she slips through his fingers, he wakes up. In reality, his mother is struggling with terminal cancer and Conor must come to terms with the fact that someday soon she won’t be around anymore. Then the Monster appears at 12:07 each night to tell him stories about the complexities of human life.

THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR ‘A MONSTER CALLS’

A Monster Calls is a dark and emotional story about a child coming to terms with his mother’s illness. This darkness is the basis for the main criticism of the novel’s new film adaptation. If you take a look at the film’s reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, you’ll find that many of those giving the film negative reviews have complained that the film’s content is far too complex and depressing for a young audience. However, I don’t think we give kids enough credit. First of all, the book won a Red House Book Award- an award voted on solely by the child readers themselves. Secondly, screw you. Children are absolutely capable of grasping complex ideas when they’re presented in an accessible way like, I don’t know, through a big talking tree maybe? With visual aids which are beautifully animated to look like watercolours?

I not only absolutely adore Patrick Ness, but have a great deal of respect for the level of trust he has that children will understand and relate to what he writes about. He never talks down to his audience. His novels are full of gorgeous fantasy and gritty realism. He knows that children too experience grief, as much as we adults wish they didn’t have to.

I think that THIS is fundamentally what the adults who criticise A Monster Calls are uncomfortable with. They don’t want to accept that grief is something that children often experience too. That this is something children might relate to is, I suppose, a tragedy of its own. But I think I’d prefer that children who are going through something like this had something to relate to, rather than just pretend it isn’t happening. A Monster Calls normalises the natural reactions we have to losing loved ones- rage, confusion, and sadness- and allows Conor to experience them whilst being understood and respected.

The book acknowledges that you can grieve for someone who isn’t dead yet, and that sometimes there is more suffering in not knowing what is going to happen than in the thing itself. When Conor finally admits that he just ‘wants it to be over’, he is finally able to come to terms with the reality of his mother’s illness. He realises that it is something that will be thoroughly unpleasant, but it will pass, and he will survive.

BOOK or MOVIE?

Book: 9/10

Movie: 8/10

#girlaboutcampus #grief #death tw #death #cancer #a monster calls #childrens lit #YA #young adult #patrick ness #respect #movie review

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centralparkpawsblog · 4 years

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Can Dogs Eat Bugs?

https://www.centralparkpaws.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_7911-2-297x300.jpg

Maybe the better question is, is it safe for dogs to eat bugs?

Because I know all too well that yes, they can and will eat insects.

Of all of the dogs I’ve shared my life with, I have had two bug eaters. One grew out of it, and one still loves the little creepy crawlies.

Daisy was the first bug eater, but she was a puppy and only ate dragonflies.

She would snap at other bugs, but for whatever reason, she would eat the dragonflies.

I tried to get her to stop, and eventually, after she got sick from eating too many (BTW, so gross), she finally resisted the flying delicacies.

Ginger looking for the fly that was “bugging” her

However, Ginger has a less discernible palate when it comes to bugs.

Essentially, if it’s moving, she will eat it. Ginger doesn’t care if it stings, flies, or crawls.

Thankfully, she doesn’t eat them in mass quantity, so she hasn’t gotten sick, and somehow she hasn’t been stung.

But I imagine there are bugs out there that aren’t safe to eat, and since we travel with our dogs a lot, I thought I would try and see if there were any that I should watch out for, to ensure Ginger doesn’t mess with anything worse than a bee.

Why Do Dogs Eat Bugs?

The short, easy answer is: Because they are dogs.

The actual answer is that no one other than dogs knows why they are intrigued by moving critters, and likely curiosity gets the best of them.

Dogs explore their world differently than humans, and part of the way they take in the world is through their mouth.

There is no rhyme or reason as to why some dogs eat bugs and others do not.

Can Dogs Eat Bugs?

It depends on the bug and how much your dog chooses to eat.

Some insects are fine for the most part, whereas others are toxic or even venomous.

I have noted some of the more common bugs that dogs sometimes choose to dine on.

Bugs aren’t the only questionable food dogs want to eat. Click here to learn if dogs can eat waffles!

Can Dogs Eat Ants?

Most ants are safe for your dog to snack on, but some of the ants that sting, like fire ants, should not be treated as appetizers[1].

Fire ants will not only sting our dogs, but they often do so in large numbers.

A dog’s face and feet are the most likely areas that are affected by ant bites.

Symptoms your dog has eaten or tried to eat fire ants include:

Facial Swelling – Which can lead to breathing issues

Lameness – If your dog was bitten on their the feet or legs

Pale Gums

Pawing at their face or rubbing their face

In the event of an allergic reaction – Hives or Anaphylactic reaction

Vomiting

Drooling

Collapse or Weakness

Can Dogs Eat Cicadas?

Cicadas are not toxic, nor do they bite or sting.

If your pooch decides to try one of these crunchy creatures, the most significant risk is stomach upset.

However, if they find them to be tasty and eat too many, the exoskeletons can become an issue since they are difficult to digest.

Can Dogs Eat Flies?

Much like the ant, the common housefly is non-toxic and lacks a stinger.

However, there are more than just houseflies, and some of those like deer and horse flies have quite a bite.

Also, fireflies, though they don’t bite, they do contain a toxin called lucibufagin[2], which can cause dogs to become sick to their stomach.

Can Dogs Eat Caterpillars?

Not all, but many of the different types of caterpillars can be troublesome if not dangerous to eat.

Some of the caterpillars that will be more than just distasteful are:

Saddleback Caterpillar[3] – This caterpillar can be identified by its bright green torso, with a brown oval in the middle, giving it the look of a saddle. Also, it has spines all along its sides and horns, and the spines are poisonous.

Monkey Slug Caterpillar[4] – This caterpillar looks more like a giant hairy spider, but it is actually a hairy caterpillar. Whether or not the caterpillar’s hairs sting or not is debatable, but what is for sure is that this prickly menace can cause discomfort to your pup if eaten. The Monkey Slug can cause your dog to choke, drool, or gag.

Monarch Caterpillar – Because these caterpillars eat milkweed, they contain a toxin called cardenolides. Cardenolides can cause heart issues, including stopping the heart. The good news is that dogs often spit these critters out due to their bitter taste. The danger of eating these caterpillars extends to their butterfly form as well.

Puss Moth Caterpillars – If the name doesn’t warn you to keep your dog from eating this fellow, its venomous nature should.

And More – Other caterpillars to keep your dog away are Io moth, Gypsy moth, Buck moth, and Flannel moth.

Can Dogs Eat Cockroaches, Fleas, Beetles, Grasshoppers, and Crickets?

What do these five bugs have in common?

They all have the potential for carrying stomach worms, and when a dog eats any of these bugs, those worms can pass along to the dog.

Keep your dog from munching these pests if you can.

Can Dogs Eat June Bugs?

Though not toxic, June bugs consumed in large quantities can cause an upset stomach.

Thankfully, “you are what you eat” has limits

Can Dogs Eat Spiders?

It depends on the spider.

If the spider is a toxic or poisonous spider to us, then it isn’t one you want your dog eating.

Especially brown recluse and black widow spiders.

Can Dogs Eat Stink Bugs?

Though not toxic, due to the nasty taste, dogs have been known to experience minor adverse reactions such as drooling or even vomiting after eating stink bugs.

Can Dogs Eat Asian Lady Beetles?

You will want to keep your pup from dining on these multicolored beetles.

They can cause GI upset and even chemical burns in their mouth and GI tract.

If your dog consumes a large quantity, it can be fatal.

Is Eating Bugs Good for Dogs?

Though not all bugs are toxic, all bugs do carry a risk of coming in contact with pesticides, insecticides, and other chemicals that can cause your dog harm.

Eating one or two insects that carry harmful chemicals may not be an issue; however, excessive insect consumption could cause an adverse reaction.

What Are the Possible Dangers of Eating Bugs?

“Is this a snack?”

Even though some bugs may not be toxic, dogs can still have allergies to them.

Daisy was allergic to bee stings, and though she didn’t eat bees, she would snap at them from time to time.

We found out after she came in from playing in my mom’s garden that she had been stung and was having an abnormal reaction.

I rushed her to the emergency room, and they were able to help her. But, from then on, we had to always travel with an epi-pen.

So, in addition to the possible toxins, venoms, and stings, there’s always the possibility of an allergic reaction.

Another concern is if your dog consumes too many, and there is no set number to what that means, dogs can have issues with digesting the exoskeleton.

If a dog an abundance of bugs, they can end up with a bezoar, a hard mass that often requires surgical intervention.

The bezoar is the result of the non-digestible parts of bugs building up in your dog’s GI system.

How Many Bugs Can Your Dog Eat?

Snails may not be bugs but they can contain harmful parasites

Ideally, none.

But if your dog does a lot will depend on:

The size of your dog

The size of the bug

The type of insect

Some dogs could eat 5 ants no problem, but if they ate 5 June bugs they might be having some significant stomach issues later, so there is no set amount.

There are just too many variables.

Bugs aren’t the only “food” which may be fine in low amounts but can be bad for your dog when they eat too much. Coconut is another example!

Conclusion

Dog’s eat the craziest things, and though none of us want to be the helicopter dog parent, we do need to be cautious of what our dogs are putting in their mouths.

Because Ginger eats anything not nailed down, I have worked on the Off and Drop commands quite extensively.

So, if you have a dog like Ginger who thinks everything from the stuffing in toys to the bug crawling along the sidewalk looks like a potential snack, training will be the best way to keep your dog safe.

I know we can’t always be with our dogs every moment of every day, but it is a good idea to know what, if any, toxic or dangerous bugs reside in your area, just in case your pup decides to try a new all natural-style treat.

Resources

https://www.petmd.com/dog/parasites/how-identify-and-treat-ant-bites-dogs

https://silentsparks.com/2017/07/06/please-dont-eat-the-fireflies/

https://ugaurbanag.com/saddleback-caterpillars/

http://www.vetstreet.com/dr-marty-becker/will-my-dog-get-sick-if-he-eats-bugs?page=2

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Why are so many people getting a meat allergy?

Becoming allergic to meat turns your life upside down. Known as alpha-gal allergy, the condition dictates what you can eat, wear, how you relax, and even which medicines are safe. Is research finally starting to catch up?

It is early morning in early summer, and I am tracing my way through the woods of central North Carolina, steering cautiously around S-curves and braking hard when what looks like a small rise turns into a narrow bridge. I am on my way to meet Tami McGraw, who lives with her husband and the youngest of their kids in a sprawling development of old trees and wide lawns just south of Chapel Hill. Before I reach her, McGraw emails. She wants to feed me when I get there:

“Would you like to try emu?” she asks. “Or perhaps some duck?”

These are not normal breakfast offerings. But for years, nothing about McGraw’s life has been normal. She cannot eat beef or pork, or drink milk or eat cheese or snack on a gelatine-containing dessert without feeling her throat close and her blood pressure drop. Wearing a wool sweater raises hives on her skin; inhaling the fumes of bacon sizzling on a stove will knock her to the ground. Everywhere she goes, she carries an array of tablets that can beat back an allergy attack, and an auto-injecting EpiPen that can jolt her system out of anaphylactic shock.

McGraw is allergic to the meat of mammals and everything else that comes from them: dairy products, wool and fibre, gelatine from their hooves, char from their bones. This syndrome affects some thousands of people in the USA and an uncertain but likely larger number worldwide, and after a decade of research, scientists have begun to understand what causes it. It is created by the bite of a tick, picked up on a hike or brushed against in a garden, or hitchhiking on the fur of a pet that was roaming outside.

The illness, which generally goes by the name ‘alpha-gal allergy’ after the component of meat that triggers it, is a trial that McGraw and her family are still learning to cope with. In much the same way, medicine is grappling with it too. Allergies occur when our immune systems perceive something that ought to be familiar as foreign. For scientists, alpha-gal is forcing a remapping of basic tenets of immunology: how allergies occur, how they are triggered, whom they put in danger and when.

For those affected, alpha-gal is transforming the landscapes they live in, turning the reliable comforts of home – the plants in their gardens, the food on their plates — into an uncertain terrain of risk.

In 1987, Dr Sheryl van Nunen was confronted with a puzzle. She was the head of the allergy department at a regional hospital in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia, and had a reputation among her colleagues for sorting out mysterious episodes of anaphylaxis. This time, a man had been sent to see her who kept waking up, in the middle of the night, in the grip of some profound reaction.

Van Nunen knew at once that this was out of the ordinary, since most allergic reactions happen quickly after exposure instead of hours later. She also knew that only a few allergens affect people after they have gone to bed. (Latex, for instance — someone sensitive to it who has sex using a latex condom might fall asleep and wake up in the midst of an allergy attack.) She checked the man for the obvious irritants and, when those tests came up negative, took a thorough look at his medical history and did a skin test for everything he had eaten and touched in the hours before bedtime. The only potential allergen that returned a positive result was meat.

This was weird (and dismaying, in barbecue-loving Australia). But it was the only such case Van Nunen had ever seen. She coached the patient on how to avoid the meals that seemed to be triggering his reactions, put it down mentally to the unpredictability of the human immune system, and moved on.

Then a few more such patients came her way. There were six additional ones across the 1990s; by 2003, she had seen at least 70, all with the same problem, all apparently affected by meat they had eaten a few hours before. Groping for an explanation, she lengthened the list of questions she asked, quizzing the patients about whether they or their families had ever reacted to anything else: detergents, fabrics, plants in their gardens, insects on the plants.

“And invariably, these people would say to me: ‘I haven’t been bitten by a bee or a wasp, but I’ve had lots of tick bites,” Van Nunen recalls.

In her memory, Tami McGraw’s symptoms began after 2010. That was the year she and her husband Tom, a retired surgeon, spied a housing bargain in North Carolina, a development next to a nature reserve whose builder had priced the big houses to sell. The leafy spread of streams and woodland pockets was everything she wanted in a home. She didn’t realise that it offered everything that deer and birds and rodents, the main hosts of ticks, want as well.

She remembers one tick that attached to her scalp, raising such a welt the spot was red for months afterwards, and a swarm of baby ticks that climbed her legs and had to be scrubbed off in a hot bath laced with bleach. Unpredictably, at odd intervals, she began to get dizzy and sick.

“I’d have unexplained allergic reactions, and I’d break out in hives and my blood pressure would go crazy,” she told me. The necklines of all her T-shirts were stretched, because she tugged at them to relieve the feeling she couldn’t take a deep breath. She trekked to an array of doctors who diagnosed her with asthma or early menopause or a tumour on her pituitary gland. They prescribed antibiotics and inhalers and steroids. They sent her for MRI scans, pulmonary function tests, echocardiograms of her heart. Nothing yielded a result.

Looking back, she realises she missed clues as to the source of her problem. She always seemed to need to use an asthma inhaler on Wednesdays — the day she spent hours in her car, delivering steaming-hot dinners for Meals on Wheels. She would feel short of breath, and need to visit an urgent-care clinic, on Saturdays — which always started, in her household, with a big breakfast of eggs and sausages.

Then a close friend had a scary episode, going for a run, arriving home and passing out on the hot concrete of her driveway. Once she was recovered, McGraw quizzed her. Her friend said: “They thought I got stung by a bee while I was running. But now they think maybe I have a red-meat allergy.”

McGraw remembers her first reaction was: That’s crazy. Her second was: Maybe I have that too.

She Googled, and then she asked her doctor to order a little-known blood test that would show if her immune system was reacting to a component of mammal meat. The test result was so strongly positive, her doctor called her at home to tell her to step away from the stove.

That should have been the end of her problems. Instead it launched her on an odyssey of discovering just how much mammal material is present in everyday life. One time, she took capsules of liquid painkiller and woke up in the middle of the night, itching and covered in hives provoked by the drug’s gelatine covering.

When she bought an unfamiliar lip balm, the lanolin in it made her mouth peel and blister. She planned to spend an afternoon gardening, spreading fertiliser and planting flowers, but passed out on the grass and had to be revived with an EpiPen. She had reacted to manure and bone meal that were enrichments in bagged compost she had bought.

She struggled with the attacks’ unpredictability, and even more with the impact on her family. “I think I’m getting better, and then I realise I’m not,” she says. “I’m more knowledgeable about what I can and can’t do.”

The discovery of new diseases often follows a pattern. Scattered patients realise they are experiencing strange symptoms. They find each other, face to face in a neighbourhood or across the world on the internet. They bring their experience to medicine, and medicine is sceptical. And then, after some period of pain and recalcitrance, medicine admits that, in fact, the patients were right.

That is the story of the discovery of CFS/ME and Lyme disease, among others. But it is not the story of alpha-gal allergy. An odd set of coincidences brought the bizarre illness to the attention of researchers almost as soon as it occurred.

The story begins with a cancer drug called cetuximab, which came onto the market in 2004. Cetuximab is a protein grown in cells taken from mice. For any new drug, there are likely to be a few people that react badly to it, and that was true for cetuximab. In its earliest trials, one or two of every 100 cancer patients who got it infused into their veins had a hypersensitivity reaction: their blood pressure dropped and they had difficulty breathing.

That 1–2 per cent stayed consistent as cetuximab was given to larger and larger groups. And then there was an aberration. In clinics in North Carolina and Tennessee, 25 of 88 recipients were hypersensitive to the drug, with some so sick they needed emergency shots of epinephrine and hospitalisation. At about the same time, a patient who was receiving a first dose of cetuximab in a cancer clinic in Bentonville, Arkansas, collapsed and died.

The manufacturers, ImClone and Bristol-Myers Squibb, checked every obvious thing about the trial: the drug’s ingredients, the cleanliness of the manufacturing plants, even the practices at the medical centres where cetuximab had been administered. Nothing stood out. The most that researchers could guess at the time was that the unlucky recipients might have some kind of mouse allergy.

Then the first coincidence occurred: a nurse whose husband worked at the Bentonville clinic mentioned the death to Dr Tina Hatley, an immunologist in private practice in Bentonville. Hatley had recently finished postgraduate training at the University of Virginia’s allergy centre, and she mentioned the death to her former supervisor, Dr Thomas Platts-Mills.

The bad responses to the drug looked like allergic reactions, and they were common enough — and far enough from the manufacturer’s expectations — to be an intriguing research opportunity.

Platts-Mills pulled together a team, looping in Hatley and several current research fellows as well. Fairly quickly, they discovered the source of the problem. People were reacting to the drug because they had a pre-existing sensitivity, indicated by a high level of antibodies (called immunoglobulin E, or IgE for short) to a sugar that is present in the muscles of most mammals, though not in humans or other primates. The name of the sugar was galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, known for short as alpha-gal.

Alpha-gal is familiar to many scientists because it is responsible for an enduring disappointment: its ability to trigger intense immune reactions is the reason that organs taken from animals have never successfully been transplanted into people. The puzzle was why the drug recipients were reacting to it. To have an allergic reaction, someone needs to have been primed with a prior exposure to a substance — but the trial recipients who reacted badly were all on their first dose of cetuximab.

Team members scrutinised the patients and their families for anything that could explain the problem. The reactions appeared regional — patients in Arkansas and North Carolina and Tennessee experienced the hypersensitivity, but ones in Boston and northern California did not. They investigated parasites, moulds and diseases that occur only in pockets of the USA.

Then Dr Christine Chung, a Nashville researcher recruited to the team, stumbled on an intriguing clue. Almost one in five of the patients enrolled at a cancer clinic at her hospital had high levels of IgE to alpha-gal. But when she checked those patients’ near neighbours, treating them as a control group — that is, people who lived their lives in the same way, but did not have cancer and had no reason to have received the drug — almost one in five had antibodies to alpha-gal as well.

Almost a decade later, that correlation still makes Platts-Mills chuckle. The alpha-gal reaction “had nothing to do with cancer,” he says. “It had everything to do with rural Tennessee.”

The question then became: what in rural Tennessee could trigger a reaction like this? The answer arose from a second coincidence. Dr Jacob Hosen, a researcher in Platts-Mills’s lab, stumbled across a map drawn by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showing the prevalence of an infection called Rocky Mountain spotted fever. It exactly overlapped the hot spots where the cetuximab reactions had occurred.

Rocky Mountain spotted fever is transmitted by the bite of a tick: Amblyomma americanum, one of the most common ticks in south-eastern USA. It’s known as the lone star tick for a blotch of white on the back of the female’s body.

The researchers wondered — if the mystery reactions shared a footprint with a disease, and ticks caused the disease, could ticks be linked to the reactions too?

It was an intriguing hypothesis, and was reinforced by a new set of patients who came trickling into Platts-Mills’s clinic at about the same time. They were all adults, and that was odd to start with, because allergies tend to show up in childhood. They had never had an allergic reaction before, but now they were experiencing allergy symptoms: swelling, hives and in the worst cases anaphylactic shock. They too had high levels of IgE antibodies to alpha-gal.

None of them, though, were cancer patients. They told the physicians that they had no proof of what was causing their reactions — but more than a few of them sensed it had something to do with eating meat.

Dr Scott Commins, another postgraduate fellow in Platts-Mills’s group, took it upon himself to phone every new patient to ask whether they’d ever suffered a tick bite. “I think 94.6 per cent of them answered affirmatively,” he says. “And the other few per cent would say, ‘You know, I’m outdoors all the time. I can’t remember an actual tick that was attached, but I know I’d get bites.’”

Meat from mammals inevitably contains alpha-gal — so in already sensitised individuals, eating meat might constitute a second exposure, in the same way infusing cetuximab had been.

If tick bites had sensitised them, then the alpha-gal reaction might be a food allergy as well as a drug reaction. But the connection was speculative, and cementing cause and effect would take one final, extraordinary coincidence.

As it happens, Platts-Mills likes to hike. One weekend he took off across the central Virginia hills, tramping through grassy underbrush. He came home five hours later, peeled off his boots and socks, and discovered his legs and feet were speckled with tiny dots. They looked like ground pepper, but they were dug into his skin — he had to use a dull knife to scrape them off — and they itched something fierce. He saved a few, and sent them to an entomologist. They were the larval form of lone star ticks.

This, he realised, was an opportunity. As soon as the work week started, he had his lab team draw his blood and check his IgE levels. They were low to start with, and then week by week began to climb. Platts-Mills is English — his father was a Member of Parliament — and in the midst of having his IgE tracked, he went to an event at the Royal Society of Medicine in London. “And at that point,” he says cheerfully, “I ate two lamb chops and drank two glasses of wine.”

In the middle of the night, he woke up covered in hives.

The lone star tick doesn’t receive much attention in the USA. It’s the black-legged tick, Ixodes scapularis, that has the dubious honour of being the most well-known, as it’s the carrier of Lyme disease, which causes an estimated 300,000 cases of illness in the USA each year.

The lone star tick doesn’t transmit Lyme disease, but is the vector for other serious illnesses, including Q fever, ehrlichiosis, Heartland virus, Bourbon virus and tularaemia, an infection so serious that the US government classifies the bacteria that cause it as a potential agent of bioterrorism.

While Lyme clusters in the north-east and the northern Midwest, the diseases carried by Amblyomma stretch from the coast of Maine to the tip of Florida, the Atlantic to the middle of Texas, and the southern shores of the Great Lakes all the way to the Mexican border.

And that range appears to be expanding. “The northern edge of where these ticks are abundant is moving,” says Dr Rick Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, north of New York City. “It is now well-established further north, into Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York and well up into New England.

“Climate change is likely playing a role in the northward expansion,” Ostfeld adds, but acknowledges that we don’t know what else could also be contributing.

It’s a universal complaint among tick scientists that we don’t know as much about ticks as we should. Tick-transmitted illnesses are more common in the USA than mosquito-borne ones — according to the CDC’s most recent accounting, in 2017 tickborne diseases were 2.6 times more common than when the agency began counting in 2004 — yet it’s mosquitoes that receive the most public health attention and funding, from national surveillance programmes to local mosquito-control campaigns. (In fact, the CDC was founded in 1942 because of mosquito-borne disease; its original title was the Office of Malaria Control in War Areas.)

What is known about where ticks live, what they feed on, and how they are affected by changes in land use and climate has mostly been assembled out of the findings of scientists fighting for scarce research funding.

It’s impossible to talk to physicians encountering alpha-gal cases without hearing that something has changed to make the tick that transmits it more common — even though they don’t know what that something might be.

The lone star tick is a sturdy, stealthy predator. It isn’t picky about conditions — it tolerates the damp of Atlantic beaches, and its western expansion only stopped when it ran up against the Texas desert — and it’s content to feed from dozens of animals, from mice all the way up the tree of life.

It loves birds, which might have helped it move north so rapidly, and it has a special lust for the white-tailed deer that have colonised American suburbs. And, unlike most ticks, it bites humans in all three stages of its lifecycle: as an adult, as a nymph and as the poppy seed-sized larvae that attacked Platt-Mills, which linger on grass stalks in clusters and spring off hundreds at a time.

Ticks detect scent with organs embedded in their first pair of legs, and what they’re sniffing for is carbon dioxide, the exhaled breath of an animal full of warm oxygenated blood. When lone star ticks catch wind of it, they take off. “The Lyme disease tick is a slow tick,” says Dr William Nicholson, a microbiologist at the CDC. “Amblyomma will run to you.”

There has been so little research into alpha-gal allergy that scientists can’t agree on exactly what stage of the bite starts victims’ sensitisation. It is possible that a fragment of a previous blood meal, from a mouse, bird or deer, lingers in a tick’s guts and works its way up through its mouth and into its human victim. It’s also possible that some still-unidentified compound in tick saliva is chemically close enough to alpha-gal to produce the same effect.

One aspect of its epidemiology is becoming clear, though. The allergy isn’t only caused by the lone star tick.

In Australia, Van Nunen (who is now a clinical associate professor at the University of Sydney School of Medicine) couldn’t understand how her patients’ tick bites solved the mystery of their meat allergy. But she could see something else. The beaches that fringe the coast north and south of Sydney are rife with ticks. If bites from them were putting people at risk of a profound allergy, she felt compelled to get the word out.

In 2007, Van Nunen wrote up a description of 25 meat-allergic patients whose reactions she had confirmed with a skin-prick test. All but two had had severe skin reactions to a tick bite; more than half had suffered severe anaphylaxis. That abstract formed the basis of a talk she gave later that year to an Australian medical association, which was then indexed — but not published in full — in an Australian medical journal. It took until 2009 for the Virginia group to catch up to it, after they had already published their first alert.

That was unfortunate, because the crucial detail in Van Nunen’s research wasn’t just that her cases were earlier than the first round of American ones. It was that they were caused by bites from a different tick: Ixodes holocyclus, called the paralysis tick. Alpha-gal allergy was not just an odd occurrence in one part of the USA. It had occurred in the opposite hemisphere, making it literally a global problem.

And so it has proved. Alpha-gal reactions linked to tick bites have now been found in the UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Norway, Panama, Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire and South Africa. These cases trace back to at least six additional tick species. (An online map on which patients list themselves includes over a dozen more countries.)

Wherever ticks bite people — everywhere other than the Arctic and Antarctic — alpha-gal allergy has been recorded. In Belgium, patients reacted badly to a drug produced in rabbit cells. In the Italian Alps, men who went hunting in the forests were more at risk than women who stayed in their village. In Germany, the most reactive food was a traditional delicacy, pork kidneys. In Sweden, it was moose.

Van Nunen herself has now seen more than 1,200 patients. “The next busiest clinic, about 350,” she says. Those cases have all occurred in two decades, less than the span of a single human generation. As in America, the surge leaves Van Nunen mystified as to what the cause might be. She reasons that the rise cannot be due to something in her patients; neither genetic nor epigenetic change could occur so quickly.

“It has to be environmental,” she says.

It’s a sunny early morning at the University of North Carolina Medical Center in Chapel Hill. Commins, who moved here in 2016 to become an associate professor, has 11 patients to see before the end of the day. Seven of them have alpha-gal allergy.

Laura Stirling, 51, is fretting over a list of questions. She does not live nearby; she flew down from Maryland, drawn by Commins’s reputation. In 2016, she found a fat lone star tick attached to her, and afterwards had fierce indigestion whenever she ate or smelled pork — a challenge, because her husband likes to tinker with a smoker on weekends. In 2017, she was bitten again, and her symptoms worsened to midnight hives and lightheadedness that sent her to her doctor’s office. She immediately cut all meat and dairy from her diet. A year later, she wants to know if she can add anything back.

“Can I eat dairy?” she asks. “Can I cook dairy? Can I eat it if it doesn’t have animal rennet in it?” She pauses. “I’ve been symptom-free, because I don’t take risks.”

Commins walks her through a protocol he’s developed, a method for adding back mammal products one dose at a time. He has a hypothesis that alpha-gal reactions are linked to the fat content of food; that might explain why they take so many hours to occur, because the body processes fat via a slower metabolic pathway than protein or carbs.

He recommends that patients start with a spoonful of grated dry cheese, because its fat content is low, and graduate by slow steps up to full-fat yogurt and milk and then to ice cream. If those foods don’t provoke reactions, he suggests tiny doses of lean meat, starting with deli ham.

Stirling lights up at that. “I dream of charcuterie,” she sighs.

Because Commins was part of Platt-Mills’s earliest research, he has been seeing alpha-gal patients for more than a decade now. He estimates he has treated more than 900 men and women; five new patients arrive every week. He has coached a significant number of them back to eating some mammal products and managing their exposures to the things they can’t handle, so their worst experience is hunting for an emergency Benadryl, not being rushed to the ER.

Not every patient can do this. Julie LeSueur, who is 45 and lives in Richmond, Virginia, has been monitored by Platts-Mills for four years. (He is one of several doctors she has seen for the condition, after years of severe stomach issues escalated to repeated attacks of anaphylaxis that put her in hospital. One physician, frustrated she wasn’t getting better, told her: “This is all in your head.”)

What started as an allergy to meat expanded into reactions to anything with an animal connection, including gelatine in medications and animal products in cosmetics, and then to sensitising her immune system to an array of other irritants, from nuts to mould. She buys vegan soap and shampoo, has prescriptions formulated by a compounding pharmacy, and mostly works from home to avoid unintended exposures. Reluctantly, she cut back a hobby that meant the world to her: fostering animals that have been rescued from abuse.

“I’m at home all the time now,” she tells me by phone. “I’m lucky to get off the couch.”

Commins and Platts-Mills named alpha-gal allergy a decade ago, and Van Nunen saw her first patient 20 years before that. A lab test for the allergy, the one that Tami McGraw received, has been on the market since 2010. (Platts-Mills and Tina Hatley, now Merritt, share the patent.) That makes it hard to understand why patients still struggle to be diagnosed and understand the limits of what they can eat or allow themselves to be exposed to. But alpha-gal allergy defies some of the bedrock tenets of immunology.

Food allergies are overwhelmingly caused by proteins, tend to surface in childhood and usually trigger symptoms quickly after a food is consumed. Alpha-gal is a sugar; alpha-gal patients tolerate meat for years before their reactions begin; and alpha-gal reactions take hours to occur. Plus, the range of reactions is far beyond what’s normal: not only skin reactions in mild cases and anaphylaxis in the most serious, but piercing stomach pain, abdominal cramps and diarrhoea as well.

But alpha-gal reactions are definitely an allergy, given patients’ results on the same skin and IgE tests that immunologists use to determine allergies to other foods. That leads both Van Nunen and Commins to wonder whether the syndrome will help to reshape allergy science, broadening the understanding of what constitutes an allergy response and leading to new concepts of how allergies are triggered.

Merritt, who estimates she has seen more than 500 patients with alpha-gal allergy, has it herself; she has had bad reactions to meat all her life, since being bitten by seed ticks at Girl Scout camp, and was re-sensitised by a lone star tick bite last year. She is sensitive enough to react not only to meat, but to other products derived from mammal tissues — and as she has discovered, they are threaded throughout modern life.

The unrecognised dangers aren’t only sweaters and soaps and face creams. Medical products with an animal origin include the clotting drug heparin, derived from pork intestines and cow lung; pancreatic enzymes and thyroid supplements; medicines that include magnesium stearate as an inert filler; vaccines grown in certain cell lines; and other vaccines, and intravenous fluids, that contain gelatine.

“We have enormous difficulty advising people about this,” Van Nunen says. “Sometimes you have to sit down for seven hours, write seven emails and have four telephone conversations to be able to say to a 23-year-old woman who’s about to travel: ‘Yes, you may have this brand of Japanese encephalitis vaccine because they do not use bovine material. The vaccine is made in [cells from] the African green monkey and I have looked up that monkey and it does not contain alpha-gal.’”

Some replacement heart values are grown in pigs; they may cause alpha-gal sensitisation that could trigger an allergy attack later. And cardiac patients who have alpha-gal allergy seem to use up replacement heart valves more quickly than normal, putting them at risk of heart failure until they can get a replacement.

There’s also a growing sense that alpha-gal may be an occupational hazard. Last year, researchers in Spain treated three farm workers who developed hives and swelling and had difficulty breathing after being splashed with amniotic fluid while they were helping calves to be born. All three of them — a 36-year-old woman, a 56-year-old woman and a 53-year-old man — already knew they had alpha-gal sensitivity, but had never imagined that skin contact would be risky.

Commins has treated hunters who developed reactions after being splashed with blood after field dressing deer; those cases raise the possibility that meat-processing workers could be at risk. In the two main Facebook groups where patients gather, it’s common to hear school cafeteria workers fret about reactions from breathing the fumes of meat cooking.

Last summer, researchers working with Commins reported that people with alpha-gal allergy may have greater allergic reactions to the stings of bees and wasps, potentially endangering landscapers and other outdoor workers.

It’s hard to know how many people may be sensitised to alpha-gal without knowing it. A project at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that studies unexplained occurrences of anaphylaxis found last year that 9 per cent of the cases weren’t unexplained after all: they were alpha-gal patients whose sensitivity had never been diagnosed.

Platts-Mills points out that the prevalence of high levels of alpha-gal IgE in his earliest studies was up to 20 per cent in some communities, “but that was absolutely not the prevalence of allergic reactions to meat,” he says. “So there are clearly plenty of people out there who’ve got the antibody but don’t have this syndrome.”

What this all means is that there are almost certainly people for whom a meat-containing meal or medical intervention could trigger an alpha-gal reaction of unknown severity.

There may be further peril awaiting them. In June, Platts-Mills and other researchers revealed that more than a quarter of patients who came to the University of Virginia’s medical centre for cardiac catheterisation, to clear out life-threatening blood-vessel blockages, were sensitised to alpha-gal without knowing it.

The patients with the undetected allergy had more arterial plaque than the ones without, and, most worrisome to the researchers, their plaques were of a type that is more likely to break away from the arterial wall and cause heart attacks and strokes. Though the research is early — done in one group of 118 patients, in a known hotspot for alpha-gal — Platts-Mills worries it presages a risk for heart disease that is larger than anyone expects.

When a new disease surfaces in the USA, it’s usually the CDC that investigates, pouring epidemiologists and data scientists into the field to track down connections and bring back samples for lab analysis. But investigation of alpha-gal is caught in a bureaucratic quirk of federal science. The CDC is responsible for infections spread by insects and arthropods — but alpha-gal syndrome is not an infection. That makes it the responsibility of NIH — which has abundant lab scientists, but no shoe-leather disease detectives.

NIH does seem to be taking an interest. In June 2018, it hosted an invitation-only one-day IgE-mediated Meat Allergy Workshop; in the past, such meetings have indicated the giant agency is considering launching a research programme. But just reading the workshop’s programme provides a hint of how new alpha-gal research is; participants called the problem by multiple different names, displaying that there isn’t even yet any agreed nomenclature for it. Similarly, the US-run universal search engine for journal articles, PubMed, indexes papers on alpha-gal under “allergy to galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose”, “mammalian meat allergy”, “delayed red meat allergy”, “galactose-α-1,3-galactose syndrome” and more.

Platts-Mills was one of the workshop’s invited speakers and gave the opening statement. Commins was there as well, along with researchers from New York, Germany, South Africa and Sweden.

Dr Marshall Plaut, who convened the meeting and is now chief of the Food Allergy, Atopic Dermatitis, and Allergic Mechanisms Section at NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, describes it as the earliest step in possibly committing to a research programme. (Platts-Mills and Commins have already received some NIH funding.) “It signals that NIH has some interest in understanding more about the disease,” he says. “There are a lot of things that need to be understood.”

In August, Commins gave a talk on alpha-gal allergy at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases, a conference held every two or so years and sponsored by the CDC that often surfaces the earliest signals of illnesses that are destined to become big problems.

The CDC’s director of foodborne illness was in the audience; so was its director of vector-borne diseases, the department that deals with ticks. Afterwards, they both zoomed up to ask him questions. “I kind of had the impression this was just a weird, small thing,” Dr Lyle Petersen, the vector-borne director, told him. “But this seems like kind of a big deal.”

With NIH and the CDC paying attention, research into alpha-gal might be reaching a threshold, a moment at which isolated investigations might coalesce into answers. For the patients, who feel isolated too, that can’t come soon enough.

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