Midterm voting is underway in Flathead County, featuring a guest appearance no less by a visibly embattled U.S. president hoping to entice local voters with timely gifts of direct deposits and cut-rate diesel.
I won’t be pocketing any tarnished nickels from dictator Vladimir Putin’s marginally cheaper fuel—thanks to President Donald Trump waiving U.S. sanctions on Russian diesel exports to the detriment of Ukraine—but I could stand to benefit from another of our beleaguered leader’s election-season offerings.
No, he’s not going to be pardoning me anytime soon for so-called fake news, but when I was based in the nation’s capital between Flathead journalism stints I was repeatedly ambushed by ticks, including the dreaded “lone star” variety.
These prevalent buggers, which feed exclusively on blood, were so aggressive they’d be crawling up my legs simply by walking to the mailbox.
I despised the minuscule seed or nymph ticks—more aptly titled “tick bombs”—the most. Hatching by the thousands on a single blade of grass, it took days before dozens of itchy disease-spreading black dots engorged themselves enough to appear on my ankles.
However, it was a mature female lone star tick, distinguished by a white dot or “lone star” on her shell, that burrowed one ghastly night beneath my pajama waistband—slurping away painlessly while I slept—that changed my life forever.
Rest assured, not everyone who gets bitten by the lone star contracts the potentially life-threatening and thus-far incurable “alpha-gal syndrome,” more commonly known as the “red meat allergy.”
Still, we’re now approaching an estimated one million Americans, including yours truly, who suffer from the nasty tick-borne illness. And with the lone star’s relentless march westward—penetrating now as close as South Dakota—its number of unwitting victims will continue to rise.
It’s been almost a decade now that I’ve skillfully evaded red meat (beef, pork, lamb, venison, elk, among other mammals); its byproducts (milk, cream, butter, cheese, broth, bouillon, lard, stock, gravy); even animal-derived non-food products hidden in medicines, vaccines and vitamins (gelatin, glycerin, magnesium stearate—countless bovine extracts).
Should any of these allergens land in my shopping cart, or else sneak into a recipe and onto my dinner plate, I most definitely will have an anaphylactic reaction (anaphylaxis) or worse yet go into anaphylactic shock. I’ve run the gamut, including on four occasions since moving back to Montana.
So how come no cure?
While alpha-gal syndrome reared its ugly head several decades ago, mainly from the southern states to Maine, nobody knew its cause until 2007 when my British-born allergist and immunologist in Virginia, Dr. Thomas Platts-Mills, discovered its link to the lone star tick (I can’t count the vials of blood the good doctor has drawn from me for his University of Virginia research).
Yet upon its discovery, instead of being labeled a tick “disease,” alpha-gal was dubbed an allergy or “syndrome.” Simply put, it’s remained far down on the federal government’s research priority list for emerging diseases.
Until now, so to speak.
No better time to point out that our nation’s beef industry, including already-stressed Republican cattle ranchers here in Montana, are none too happy with the president right now. Except this go-round their griping has nothing to do with the costly impacts of Trump’s tariffs, his foreign beef imports, or the price of diesel.
Instead, and what you probably didn’t hear about, Trump in recent days signed an executive order directing his Agriculture and Health and Human Services secretaries to explore the addition of warning labels on foods containing “significant amounts of alpha-galactose, in a manner similar to other allergy warnings.”
Red meat, in other words, and its hidden derivatives.
For the aforementioned reasons, I might be the only human in Montana applauding the president’s order— albeit his gesture, unfortunately, stops short of any substantial federal earmarks for alpha-gal research (even as the president continues to spend millions upon millions of dollars on alleged beautification projects in Washington).
That said, the president isn’t going to let swarms of ticks or even mosquitoes ruin the experience of visitors when they flock to the new Trump arches and monuments—and now a golf course.
“Ticks and mosquitoes are among the deadliest animals worldwide,” Trump writes in the executive order, “and have become the dominant species in some areas, including the District of Columbia (D.C.), spreading disease and diminishing the quality of life.”
So for now—albeit only within the boundaries of the nation’s capital—the president with the stroke of his pen is calling on his Cabinet to “remediate ticks and mosquito breeding grounds on lands subject to Federal jurisdiction throughout D.C.”
And while they’re at it, Trump said, concentrate on “diagnosing, preventing, and treating the syndromes and diseases spread by ticks … including alpha-gal syndrome.”
Hear, hear, Donald!
John McCaslin is a longtime journalist and author who lives in Bigfork.