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‘Explosive increase’ of ticks that cause meat allergy in US due to climate crisis
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
206 points (98.6% liked)
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“They will hunt you, they are like a cross between a lentil and a velociraptor,” said Sharon Pitcairn Forsyth, a conservationist who lives in the Washington DC area.
This is what we call a negative feedback loop. More CO2 emissions->more ticks->more meat allergy->less demand for cattle->less CO2 emissions
Unpopular opinion but hear me out - doesn't a nice bowl of ticks go great with iced tea on a hot day?
Oh boy! Prepare for conspiracy theorys of BIG VEGAN creating ticks in labs to make Americans turn gay.
"drill baby drill"
(Based based based based based based based based based based based based based based based based based based based based based )
That sucks :( i hope not too many people get bitten
Remember non vegans, your lust for meat and the resulting impact on the climate will eventually force you to stop eating meat. You played yourselves.
Remember non vegans, your lust for meat and the resulting impact on the climate will eventually force you to stop eating meat. You played yourselves.
FYI: This ☝️. This is why people don't like vegans. It has nothing to do with your dietary choices or choosing to not use or consume products derived from animals - seriously, no one gives a shit; you do you. It has everything to do with the militantly self-righteous, condescending, preachy, holier-than-thou attitude, the constant proselytizing, and the demonizing/name-calling/general shitty behavior that comes with the former.
Sincerely,
A vegetarian who doesn't make it my whole personality
Edit: Every single direct reply to this has further illustrated the point I was making. Maybe instead of being preachy and condescending, you just lead by good example. If people see and want what you have they'll follow. Otherwise, you're just shooting your own cause in the foot with your abominable behavior.
Good thing I don't care what carnists (including vegetarians) think of me 🤷🏻♀️
Not everyone can afford to be vegan yknow?
So why don't you get off your high horse privileged ass and consider that this vegetarian person is obviously trying to mitigate some damage by not eating meat.
People hold strong, defensive opinions about all kinds of things, funny how you don’t react this way to those too.
It’s pure carnism defense mechanisms in action. If you ever wonder how MAGA supporters can be so detached from reality, remember you’re doing the same thing.
The truly self-righteous position is thinking you have a right to their bodies.
Isn't similarly militant and self-righteous when someone feels this way about trans rights or abolishing slavery?
comparing slaves and trans people to animals is gross.
Nooooo. I have to reduce veganism to a dietary preference instead of a rights movement so it's easier to dismiss it because a vegan was annoying or whatever one time!
bohoo stop blaming our consumer habits that are destroying the planet
This 🙌
Remember vegans, we will just harvest it from cloned meat.
People will eat insects rather than stop fucking with animals. The lengths y’all go to are insane.
Insects are animals
I think that is what they are saying. People would rather eat insects, which are animals, rather than just go vegan
If this lab grown "meat" can be created in petri dishes or whatever without animal exploitation and suffering then it will be vegan by definition.
Edit: Ah it's not lab grown meat but genetically altered animals that they farm. :/
Remember non vegans, cloned meat will trigger your nearly acquired meat allergy the same as hoof-grown meat. It is, after all, meat.
More likely that those with an allergy can pay more to eat specific lab grown meat that doesn’t trigger the allergy.
Since it’s already happened
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/04/alpha-gal-syndrome-tick-meat-allergy/629649/
Since last fall, Revivicor has been quietly sending refrigerated packages of alpha-gal-free bacon, ham, ground pork, chops, and pork shoulders to people in the alpha-gal-syndrome community. These packages were free, but Revivicor has told the FDA it is exploring a mail-order business. And so a biomedical company has found itself an accidental purveyor of specialty pork products.
On the plus side, meat consumption will decrease.
Seriously. This is going to make me start believing in Gaia Theory.
Please when sharing wikipedia links remove the m. as the browser will decide if it wants the mobile version anyway. Thanks!
There are A LOT of negative feedback loops. We don't like to talk about them because they are usually trouble.
I can fuck with this. Spookier if you consider humans.
Neurodivergence (and all immune-mediated conditions) are increasing in response to the environment which results in people like Greta who directly resist the damage that’s causing the increased incidence.
Is it increasing or is testing for it increasing + becoming more socially visible?
Both.
It's much harder to prove this for things like neurodivergence but easy to do so for things like autoimmune conditions, type-1 diabetes, MS, etc.
And the fact that they're co-morbid isn't coincidence!
https://me-pedia.org/wiki/RCCX_Genetic_Module_Theory
The RCCX genetic module is a chimeric region that stays linked, adapts, and spits out mutations in response to environmental factors. Most complex gene cluster in our genome, in the most complex region, and state of the art techniques still struggle to sequence it in all its detail still. Recently shown to be behind sex biases in immune conditions by MIT. But personally I think it’s fascinating and meshes well with the Gaia hypothesis.
It is demonstrably true that life on a planet alters the conditions of the planet (which then alters the life, etc). Most glaring is the abundance of oxygen in our atmosphere. We don't look for oxygen on other planets because oxygen is necessary for life; we look for oxygen because it's unlikely to exist in high densities without life to produce it.
The sci-fi novel Death's End by Cixin Liu (third in a series) further suggests that life alters the universe rather than just local systems, which was a fun idea. He's a rather long-winded author, but he's easy to forgive.
That said, this is the first time I'm hearing of the hypothesis by name, so I can't be sure what all it says. A quick skim lines up with reality though.
It's more that life itself almost evolves an entire planet to best benefit life itself. Or that when life on the planet as whole is threatened, life evolves to address the crisis. For example, in the caboniferous, trees evolved undigestable lignin, and this caused a misbalance in nature as forests grew and died with nothing to digest the dead trees. In time, organisms arose that could digest wood, and the balance was restored.
Here, the problem is greenhouse gas emissions. And meat consumption is one of the biggest drivers of meat consumption. So nature responds by making humans allergic to meat!
The Gaia hypothesis is quite out there because it ascribes a sort of collective will or intention to nature, rather than just the blind machinations of evolution.
The hypothesis kind of seems like selection bias to me. It seems more likely to me that in order for life to flourish as it has on earth, it has to (by pure chance) create a self regulating system, as otherwise it will eventually die off. What's interesting (and I hadnt thought about prior to reading the wikipedia article) to me is that it seems possible that the current rapid temperature rise will lead to some organism(s) we don't know or think about multiplying like crazy, and that has some form of cooling effect due to the organism's emissions or w/e. Industrialized humans appear to be the most extreme (in the sense of rapid, persistent change) climate event to happen to this planet since it has had life, but at the very least we're not the first time something fucked up the climate. Maybe we'll just get lucky after all.
Bacteria and worms started digesting some plastics
Given that we're gutting our health care sector to the tune of $850B, that might not be due to people with meat allergies switching to vegetables so much as it is people with meat allergies simply dying.