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A comment on The Devil Bird' Lands in New York, with More Likely to Come. Parent comment

Re:The Devil Bird' Lands in New York, with More Likely to Come by TeMPOraL on Monday May 08, 2023 @08:37AM (#35860877)
> I really like living in a place where "permanent allergy to red meat" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amblyomma_americanum) isn't a thing

From that Wikipedia link:

> The bite of the lone star tick can cause a person to develop alpha-gal meat allergy, a delayed response to nonprimate mammalian meat and meat products.

Non-primate mammalian.

Plot twist: cannibalistic cultures as adaptations to living in areas highly permeated by organisms spreading alpha-gal meat allergy.

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Re:The Devil Bird' Lands in New York, with More Likely to Come by foobarian on Monday May 08, 2023 @09:20AM (#35861254)
And dare we ask how this was experimentally determined :cringe:
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Re:The Devil Bird' Lands in New York, with More Likely to Come by i_am_jl on Monday May 08, 2023 @09:45AM (#35861449)
"Alpha gal" is the short name for a sugar that occurs in most mammals, but not primates. Cannibalistic experimentation wasn't necessary.
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Re:The Devil Bird' Lands in New York, with More Likely to Come by ano-ther on Monday May 08, 2023 @12:42PM (#35863766)
Good explanation.

Presumably it would also be quite unpleasant to be allergic to your own muscles.

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Re:The Devil Bird' Lands in New York, with More Likely to Come by wkat4242 on Monday May 08, 2023 @01:44PM (#35864626)
Kinda ironic because eating too much red meat is one of the major causes of climate change besides fossil fuels. Cow farts/manure (methane), the use of many many kilos of vegetarian food to produce one kilo of beef.. It's something that will have to change. It seems to be a way that nature balances itself.

According to the UN livestock is the cause of 14% of greenhouse gas emissions: https://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/

And beef is by far the worst out of them: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/0477/production/...

I don't eat much meat myself, but I'm not fully vegetarian or vegan either. I try to balance it more (though mostly because of animal welfare reason, not climate change).

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