Humans evolved by losing the capacity to synthesize glycan Galα1-3Galβ1-(3)4GlcNAc-R (α-Gal), which resulted in develop a protective response mediated anti-α-Gal IgM/IgG antibodies against pathogens containing this modification on membrane proteins. As an evolutionary trade-off, humans can alpha-Gal syndrome (AGS), recently diagnosed disease mainly associated with allergic reactions mammalian m...

BACKGROUND Lyme borreliosis (LB) is the most common tick-borne disease in the United States and Europe. The incidence is 13.4 per 100,000 inhabitants in the United States and more than 300 per 100,000 inhabitants in Europe. Children are at highest risk of LB. In the Netherlands in 2007, the incidence of tick bites in children between 10-14 years varied from 7,000 -11,000 per 100,000, depending ...

To the Editor: Over the past few years, allergy to mammalian meat has been identified as a new syndrome of food allergy presenting as symptoms of delayed severe allergic reactions after consumption of red meat (beef, lamb, or pork). These allergic reactions are directed against the carbohydrate galactose-a-1,3-galactose (a-Gal). In the initial studies on red meat allergy, Commins et al observed...

BACKGROUND Lyme disease or Lyme borreliosis (LB) is the most common tick-borne disease both in the United States and Europe. Children, in particular, are at high risk of contracting LB. Since child-specific educational tools on ticks, tick bites and LB are lacking, we developed an online educational video game. In this study, we compared the effectiveness of an online educational video game ver...

BACKGROUND Lyme borreliosis (LB) is the most common reported tick-borne infection in Europe, and involves transmission of Borrelia by ticks. As long as a vaccine is not available and effective measures for controlling tick populations are insufficient, LB control is focused on preventive measures to avoid tick bites. To inform citizens about the risk of ticks, motivate them to check for tick bi...

Prevention of tick bites and transmission of tick-borne pathogens requires the use of molecules that target physiological processes crucial to both tick and pathogen survival. These molecules are best tested in standardized in vitro assays. Because hard ticks require several days to feed to repletion, the development of in vitro feeding assays for these species is challenging. A standard and ea...

Localized scalp hair loss has different causes which alopecia areata, trichotillomania, tinea capitis and early lupus erythematosus are the most important ones. There are several reports of localized alopecia after tick and flea bites and bee stings, but there is only one report of ant-induced alopecia in the literature. We report herein two cases of alopecia induced by ants of genus Phei...

Summary Food allergies, especially delayed hypersensitivity reactions, are often challenging for both patients and clinicians. Here, we report the case of a 64-year-old man who had allergic reactions six hours after eating a meal containing red meat. He reported that he had several tick bites in months before the reaction. High serum specific IgE levels of alpha-gal confirmed the diagnosis of a...

We report the case of a 55-year-old man who went into anaphylactic shock six hours after eating a meal containing meat. He reported having had several tick bites in months before the reaction. The serum specific IgE showed strong positivity to alpha-gal. This is clearly alpha-gal anaphylaxis with delayed onset after meat ingestion caused by tick bite, confirmed by alpha-gal IgE positivity.

BACKGROUND The causes of the recent rise of tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) incidence in Europe are discussed. Our objective was to estimate the impact of air temperature change on TBE incidence in the European part of the Russian Arctic. METHODS We analysed the TBE incidence in the Komi Republic (RK) over a 42-year period in relation to changes in local annual average air temperature, air temp...