A 47-year-old airline pilot from New Jersey who died from an allergic reaction to red meat caused by a tick bite — known as alpha-gal syndrome (AGS) — was the first-recorded death of its kind, medical researchers say.
An expert group of allergists and immunologists at the University of Virginia School of Medicine reported the man’s cause of death on Wednesday in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice. Until then, it had been a mystery.
According to researchers, the unidentified man, who had no significant medical history, fell severely ill after consuming a beef steak for dinner while on a camping trip with his wife and children in the summer of 2024. He experienced severe abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhea.
The next morning, he felt well enough to go on a five-mile hike, but told his wife that at the height of his illness, which lasted a couple of hours, he thought he “was going to die.” The couple decided against seeing a doctor.
Two weeks later, they attended a barbecue in New Jersey, where the man ate a hamburger at around 3 p.m. Afterwards, he returned home and mowed the lawn for an hour. At about 7:20 p.m., after his wife had left the house, he went to the bathroom. Roughly 10 minutes later, his son was on the phone with his mom, saying, “Dad is getting sick again.”
A short while after that, he found his dad unresponsive on the bathroom floor, lying in a pool of vomit. The son called 911 at 7:37 p.m. and initiated life-saving measures.
Paramedics attempted to resuscitate the man for two hours, which included transferring him to the hospital. At 10:22 p.m., he was declared dead.
The autopsy concluded he died a “sudden unexplained death.”
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His wife, perplexed by her husband’s death, asked a friend, Dr. Erin McFeely — a practicing pediatrician of more than 20 years — to review the autopsy report. McFeely then reached out to researchers in Virginia and permitted the Medical Examiner’s Office to send the post-mortem blood to Virginia, the journal article says.
His blood was tested in April 2025, and the results showed a significant percentage of antibodies directed towards alpha-gal — a sugar found in beef and other mammalian products, including tick saliva — suggesting the presence of a beef allergy.
A post-mortem tryptase test was also performed. Tryptase is an enzyme released during a severe allergic reaction. His tryptase level was extremely high, in a range typically seen in people who die from fatal anaphylaxis.
“His level was 2,000. The highest level I’ve seen in practice of a person who survived 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 asked by researchers if her husband had tick bites, his wife said he had in the past, but none in 2024. She added that earlier in the summer, before he died, he had 12 or 13 “chigger” bites around his ankles, which left small, itchy bumps on his skin.
Chiggers are not ticks, but the larvae of certain mites. In the eastern United States, what are often called “chiggers” are more commonly the larvae of Lone Star ticks, “which are known to bite humans and are an important cause of sensitization to alpha-gal,” the journal says.
This, along with the fact that severe abdominal pain is not a commonly known symptom of anaphylaxis, according to researchers, meant neither the man nor his wife considered his illness to be linked to ticks or caused by “anaphylaxis.” They didn’t connect either his bites or the stomach pain with the beef he had eaten hours before both reactions occurred.
“The postmortem also did not recognize anaphylaxis as a possible cause of death,” researchers wrote.
The study also noted that a large and increasing number of people in the United States are being exposed to the Lone Star tick, primarily because the tick is expanding its range northward and due to the presence of large deer populations in many states.
“The result is that there are many sensitized individuals who are unaware of the fact that both larvae “chiggers” [the slang for tick larva, not the mite] and mature ticks can cause sensitization to alpha-gal,” researchers wrote, adding that better education about the risks and presence of AGS is needed for the general public and medical professionals.
Researchers also warned in the article that consuming alcohol and exercising can increase the rate at which allergens are absorbed into the body, and that the New Jersey pilot exercised and drank a beer on the day of his death, according to the journal.
In Canada, thanks to warming winters and milder temperatures, ticks are thriving in more parts of the country than ever before — bringing a growing risk of tick-borne illnesses like Lyme disease.
Black-legged ticks, the species responsible for most Lyme disease cases in Canada, are expanding their range rapidly and are now found in parts of every southern province. This spread is closely tied to climate change, which allows ticks to survive winter and move into once-too-cold regions, putting more people and pets at risk.
Although there are more than 40 tick species in Canada, the most common one is the black-legged tick, also known as the deer tick, and its numbers are on the rise.
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— With files from Global News
© 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
