Ticks cause health problems other than Lyme Disease - I wonder if any of you Lyme sufferers have experienced an allergy to red meat which could not be previously explained?
Cooper Westaway with his mum Rebecca at their Warriewood home. Cooper, 16, was bitten by a tick at school late last year.
TICK bites have caused more than 1000 Australians to develop a life-threatening allergy to red meat, with numbers of people affected rising dramatically over the past decade.
Immunologist Sheryl van Nunen sees between one to two victims every week at her Chatswood practice.
The allergy can cause an anaphylactic reaction up to eight hours after a person eats red meat, and the allergy can develop months after a bite.
Cooper Westaway with his mum Rebecca and dog Harvey: “I end up eating chicken all the time and I’m so sick of it.” Picture: Troy Snook
The Australian paralysis tick, which cause the mammalian allergy, is most common on the north shore and the northern beaches in Sydney, but are also found all along the east coast. “The numbers have increased markedly since 2003,” Dr van Nunen said.
“The important advice is to kill the tick where it is by freezing it with a spray from the pharmacy. Don’t squeeze it with tweezers.”
Sixteen-year-old Cooper Westaway (pictured) loves meat pizzas but can’t eat them any more. The Year 10 student from Warriewood now carries an epipen with him wherever he goes — all because a tick bit him at school last November.
“The tick gave me a meat ¬allergy, which is really annoying as I end up eating chicken all the time and I’m so sick of it,” Cooper says.
He is one of a growing number of Sydney-siders — and residents up and down Australia’s east coast — who have become victims of the unusual meat allergy caused by common bush ticks. A tick had attached itself to his head when he ran through bushes at his school, Mater Maria College.
Later in class he scratched it out and the bite site became really itchy. Being new to school, he didn’t want to speak up, and the reaction passed.
But a fortnight later, after a dinner of chilli con carne, he woke up in the night “going insane with itches” and with a swelling throat. The next day the GP sent him to see Dr van Nunen and blood tests confirmed the allergy diagnosis.
Cooper’s mother Rebecca Westaway said the state health department should be sending letters to schools to alert them to the dangers of ticks
