WEST TISBURY, Mass. — Like a matador swirling his cape, Patrick Roden-Reynolds pulled a swatch of white flannel this way and that on the grass and leaf litter in my yard. After a minute or so, he plucked 11 tiny ticks from the cloth with tweezers, and stuck them on a lint roller.
“It’s like a plague,” he said, peering at his haul. “Ticks are everywhere now.”
I had asked Roden-Reynolds, a public health biologist, to inspect my yard because a lone star tick bit me as I was chopping wood last fall. It wasn’t painful, but after several weeks I developed alpha-gal syndrome, an increasingly common allergy to red meat, dairy and other mammalian food products.
Roden-Reynolds, 33, drags white cloth flags across a grassy area to collect ticks on Martha’s Vineyard.
Like many on Martha’s Vineyard, a resort island off Cape Cod that’s teeming with ticks this year, I bid a sad farewell to hamburgers, bacon and lamb chops. No ice cream. No pizza. My medicine cabinet became a minefield of animal-derived byproducts, including gelatin capsules and pain meds with lactose.
If I err, and I do, my legs sometimes itch so fiercely they feel on fire and I break out in hives. I grew ill one night just from the fumes of grilling meat. And I’ve got a mild case. Some victims suffer headaches, nausea, fever, diarrhea, vomiting or abdominal cramps so sharp that a friend calls them “knives in the stomach.”
Lone star ticks are named for the white dot on the female’s back.
(Lauren Bishop / U.S. Centers For Disease Control and Prevention via AP)
Martha’s Vineyard, long known for attracting celebrities, has become the inevitable butt of memes as it battles the hostile arachnids. Editors from London to Hollywood, elated that blood-sucking predators are attacking A-listers on their private beaches, have posted lurid headlines about “Vegan Vampire” ticks and “Billionaires Under Siege.”
The mechanical chomping shark in “Jaws,” which was filmed on the Vineyard in 1975, invariably gets a mention. As in the thriller, anxious local leaders debated whether publicizing the peril would scare off tourists.
The island’s troubles are another reminder of the unexpected effects of climate change. Once confined to the Southeast, lone star ticks spread from Maine to Oklahoma in recent years as the climate warmed and as a decline in hunting led to an explosive growth in the number of whitetail deer, where lone stars find mates and breed.
The tick-borne allergy was discovered only in 2007, and researchers still can’t say why some immune systems go haywire and some don’t. A delayed reaction adds to the muddle because most victims don’t get sick until hours after eating, and weeks or months after the tick bite. There’s no known cure.
“It’s enigmatic enough that it’s almost the stuff of sci-fi or fantasy,” said Dr. Jeffrey Wilson, a University of Virginia School of Medicine allergist and immunologist who has treated nearly 1,000 alpha-gal patients. Many were dumbfounded to discover that food they’d enjoyed all their lives suddenly made them deathly ill.
1. Roden-Reynolds does tick surveys throughout Martha’s Vineyard. . 2. When Roden-Reynolds conducts tick surveys, he wears clothing permeated with the tick-killing insecticide permethrin.
“For a lot of people, this is antithetical to being American,” Wilson told me. “They say, ‘I want to go outside and do what I want to do. I want to eat a hamburger.’”
At a party on the Vineyard recently, I met Jean-Marc Dupon, a 61-year-old former French chef who can no longer work in a professional kitchen due to his alpha-gal. He was twice rushed to the hospital after his throat closed, he couldn’t breathe and his blood pressure plummeted — a severe allergic reaction called anaphylaxis.
He was so stricken when a local restaurant mistakenly grilled his food in butter, instead of oil, that he was unconscious when the ambulance arrived.
“It’s not just an inconvenience for me,” he said. “It’s a matter of life and death.”
Alpha-gal-friendly pastries on display at a local market on Martha’s Vineyard in May.
(Finn Gomez / Boston Globe via Getty Images)
The first alpha-gal fatality was confirmed in 2025 after Brian Waitzel, an otherwise healthy JetBlue pilot, died four hours after he ate a hamburger at a backyard barbecue in New Jersey. Experts say other deaths almost certainly have occurred.
It’s unclear how many people are affected, but in July, a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that an accurate tally would “far exceed” the CDC’s 2022 estimate of 450,000 Americans.
That study found 1 in 4 adults tested positive for alpha-gal in the five worst-hit states — Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee and Virginia, or more than 4 million people. The counting is tricky, however. Only a small percentage of those who test positive, perhaps 15%, show symptoms.
Those who do often struggle to get help. A 2017 study in North Carolina found more than 90% of alpha-gal cases were misdiagnosed, often as food poisoning, because doctors were unfamiliar with it. My dermatologist in Washington, D.C., didn’t even know a blood test could measure alpha-gal antibodies.
Nancy Slonim Aronie, a writer and artist friend on the Vineyard, had a more alarming experience after she was rushed to a hospital in Boston in January for open heart surgery.
“The surgeon told me I might need a new heart valve, and that she had a cow valve she could use,” Aronie recalled. “And I said, ‘No, no, no, I have alpha-gal.’ And she said, ‘What’s that?’ And I thought, ‘Wow, my surgeon doesn’t know about alpha-gal.’ And then she said, ‘No problem, I think I have a pig valve on the shelf.’” And I’m like, ‘No pig!’”
In the end, she didn’t need a replacement valve. But she was treated with heparin, an anticoagulant derived from intestinal tissue of pigs. She broke out in hives, and “since then I’ve had really bad alpha-gal, much worse than before the operation.”
Lone star ticks, named for the white dot on the female’s back, haven’t hit California. But the western blacklegged tick, known as the deer tick in most of the country, is common in the state’s chaparral, grasslands and woods, and can transmit Lyme disease, babesiosis and other pathogens.
Luckily, those diseases can be cured by antibiotics or other remedies. Plus, an infected deer tick must keep its harpoon-like feeding tube in the bloodstream for 36 to 48 hours to transmit the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. That’s enough time for many to remove the tick.
A lone star bite, in contrast, instantly injects a galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose carbohydrate molecule into the blood. The sugar, found in most mammals but not in humans, prompts the antibodies that trigger an allergic reaction.
Lone stars are tough little buggers. Though low temperatures will plunge them into dormancy, they produce a type of antifreeze that lets them survive harsh winters. They can stay hours underwater, and have no natural predators. And they’ve been around since the dinosaurs.
“It’s the most aggressive tick in North America,” said Thomas Mather, professor of public health entomology and head of a tick research center at the University of Rhode Island. It’s also apparently the swiftest.
“If ESPN ever puts a tick race on TV, always put your money on the lone star,” he said.
Sensory organs in their eight feet and two antenna-like palps sense heat or carbon dioxide from people passing by, and they quickly climb aboard, piercing the flesh with long, barbed mouthparts.
“Think of them as a cross between a lentil and a velociraptor,” the National Society of Professional Surveyors, a group not normally known for purple prose, warns on its website. “These aggressive hunters,” it adds, “will actively pursue you across significant distances.”
On the Vineyard, local health officials call the threat a crisis. The Martha’s Vineyard Hospital has tallied an exponential rise in positive alpha-gal tests — 692 this year through August, compared with 742 last year, and up from only two in 2020.
“It is the most pressing emerging illness on the island right now,” Claire Seguin, president of the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital, told me. “It seems everyone I know has, or knows someone who has, alpha-gal syndrome, including here at the hospital.”
To ease pressure on the emergency room, the hospital opened a special outpatient clinic in June for tick-bite victims, and nearly 400 people were treated. The hospital also launched a $4-million research project into why only some people are affected and why their reactions vary so dramatically.
“Fear of tick bites rather than shark attacks now dominate the conversation,” agreed an op-ed in the Vineyard Gazette. “Like lead in the water in Flint, Mich., and the forest fires out West, the very fabric of our lives is being altered.”
“The situation is untenable,” Virginia Barbatti, executive director of Tick Free MV, a new nonprofit group that is trying to coordinate a response, told me. “What’s clear is everyone wants a path to solving this crisis.”
In response, school lunch menus were revamped to offer more meatless and dairy-free options. Restaurants in the island’s six towns, from the Sweet Life Cafe in Oak Bluffs to the Fish House in Edgartown, tweaked menus, recipes and how they cook.
“I switch out my pans, and I’m careful with knives and cutting boards to avoid cross contamination,” said Charlie Granquist, chef at Slough Farm. “I just know so many people with alpha-gal.”
He said his wife discovered her allergy only this spring when she “turned red as an Oompa Loompa” and went into anaphylaxis two hours after eating a hamburger.
At least nine companies sell pricey pesticide treatments or natural oil sprays for the backyard that are supposed to repel deer, or ticks, sparking an angry debate over whether they also endanger pets and pollinators. But other than avoiding tick bites, there’s no obvious solution.
“The holy grail is a tick vaccine,” Lea Hamner, an epidemiologist with a tick-focused program on the island, told an anxious crowd at one of the many public meetings focused on ticks. “People are working on it. But it’s a long way off.”
For now efforts are aimed at culling the vast deer herd. An aerial drone survey in March counted 4,681 white-tailed deer. It’s now probably closer to 6,000, far more than the 1,500 deemed optimal for wildlife management and tick control.
Officials have considered mass sterilization or hiring sharpshooters, but those options are wildly expensive. A treatment to eliminate ticks on deer, like a tick collar on dogs, shows promise. A proposed Roomba-like device to suck ticks out of the grass probably does not.
Hoping to boost the deer harvest, Massachusetts extended the Vineyard’s hunting season, which started Sept. 21, by six weeks, but most of the island’s 183 registered hunters only kill one or two deer a year — hardly enough to make a major impact.
But Brian Athearn, 54, is determined to try. An avid bowhunter, he shot 42 deer last year and hopes to take more this year. He donates the venison to food pantries because he has alpha-gal and his son “almost died from anaphylactic shock from two Advil gel caps,” he told me.
“I’m in it for revenge now,” he said.
Athearn has gone vegan, but I’m not there yet. I enjoy eating emu and ostrich, which taste surprisingly like beef. We also get pork chops that were genetically modified to remove the alpha-gal molecule, the byproduct of efforts to produce safe pig-based substances for pharmaceuticals.
When I’m futzing in the garden or hiking, I wear socks, pants and shirts permeated with the tick-killing insecticide permethrin. As insurance, I tuck my shirt in, pull my socks over my pant legs, and wear ankle-covering gaiters. It’s not high fashion, but I’ve avoided another bite. One friend wears her gaiters on the beach. I’m not there yet either.
By conducting tick surveys at various locations over time, Roden-Reynolds and other biologists are able to document the spread of the voracious arachnids.
On a recent afternoon I joined Roden-Reynolds, the public health biologist, as he surveyed an elderly couple’s yard in Chilmark, a tick hot spot. We both suited up in permethrin-infused clothes and gaiters, and he went to work with his white flannel flag, dragging it to and fro on the grass.
“We’ve gone from zero to crisis in five years,” he said as he stalked his prey.
He stopped after a few minutes to count his catch. “I’m just about getting a tick on every drag now,” he said. “There’s 11, 12, 13.”
He started up again but wiped his brow and quit when he hit 37.
Drogin is a special correspondent.
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