“Lone star tick,” he says.¹
That is the new villain in an old Vineyard story.
Ticks are not new on Martha’s Vineyard. Lyme disease has been part of Island life for decades. Babesiosis, a malaria-like infection of red blood cells, has long haunted the Cape and Islands.⁶ Tularemia, or rabbit fever, has its own strange Vineyard history.⁸
But the lone star tick has changed the terms.
Its bite can trigger alpha-gal syndrome, an allergy to mammalian meat and sometimes dairy, gelatin, medicines, and medical products. In plain English: a tick bite can make you allergic to burgers, bacon, cheese, gel caps, and maybe your friend’s grill.²
This is how a disease leaves the woods and enters the kitchen.
The Globe quoted one West Tisbury man with alpha-gal saying, “I don’t get invited to barbecues anymore.” He also said he missed walking around barefoot in a bathing suit.
“That’s over.”¹
That line stopped me. A man loses the right to walk barefoot in summer, not by law or age or injury, but by tick.
Another Globe story described Rick Karney, a Vineyard biologist, eating steak at home in 2020. He got up to get water. “Then the next thing I remember,” he said, “I woke up on the floor.” The diagnosis was anaphylaxis from alpha-gal. Now, he said, “I’m wicked neurotic about the ticks.”³
Alpha-gal is unnerving because the bite that primes the allergy and the reaction that reveals it can be separated by weeks or months. The CDC says symptoms often appear two to six hours after exposure to red meat, dairy, or other products containing alpha-gal. Dinner may be fine until the middle of the night, when your body suddenly remembers what you never noticed.²
Martha’s Vineyard is not officially the worst tick island on earth. That sounds like something said by a man at the end of a bar.
CDC data have limitations, but they consistently place Dukes County and Nantucket among the country’s notable tick-borne disease hot spots.⁴ Older CDC Lyme surveillance found Nantucket County had the highest 15-year average county-specific Lyme rate in the United States from 1992 through 2006.⁵ Babesiosis was once so closely associated with Nantucket that people called it “Nantucket fever.”⁶
So my vet was exaggerating, but he was aiming in the right direction.
Years ago, I heard someone claim there had even been a case of bubonic plague on Martha’s Vineyard. That turns out not to be true. Massachusetts says plague has not been reported in the state in more than a century.⁷ But the rumor points toward something real: the Island experienced the only two recognized U.S. outbreaks of primary pneumonic tularemia, including one linked to mowing and brush cutting and another that may have involved a dog carrying bacteria into a cottage.⁸ Not plague, then, but another example of how ordinary Vineyard life and disease ecology overlap.
The Island is already adapting. Public health officials have held meetings on alpha-gal-safe kitchens. Chefs talk about separate pans, separate surfaces, and the danger of treating a life-threatening allergy as if it were a dietary preference.