Alpha-gal

This is a very interesting article. A piece I did not understand until I did some additional research was this part:

"Oncologists in the southeastern United States noticed something strange. In Tennessee and North Carolina, 22% of cetuximab patients suffered immediate hypersensitivity reactions on their first infusion. In the northeastern US, the figure was under 1%.⁷ The regional pattern was striking. Patients were reacting violently to a drug they had never been exposed to before, which meant something had sensitized them in advance."

Then I looked up the tick map from https://tickapp.tamu.edu/home/tick-identification/lone-star-tick/lst_distribution_map/ and saw the illustration. Makes sense now.

And then I saw the pic below from this study https://www.jaci-inpractice.org/article/S2213-2198(23)01201-1/abstract