After I was bitten by tick, I developed a rare allergy to meat. Now I'm a quasi-vegetarian.

Menios Constantinou is a Sydney-based writer and journalist with an interest in the work of experts in science and the humanities. Menios discusses his recent experience of a tick bite and the development of mammalian meat allergy that followed.

Menios explains; “The specific allergen is galactose-α-1,3-galactose, better known as "alpha-gal", a molecule found in non-primate mammals — cows, pigs, sheep and kangaroos, to name a few — and which can be transmitted to humans through tick bites.

Most food allergies, like those to prawns and peanuts, are caused by proteins, triggering symptoms very soon after the allergen is consumed. But alpha-gal is a carbohydrate, and reactions can occur up to ten hours after the meat is eaten.

That means sufferers often wake in the middle of the night, hours after enjoying a dinner of lamb korma or beef bourguignon, with hives all over their body.

Once exposed, the body starts to see the alpha-gal present in mammalian meat as a threatening substance, triggering a hypersensitive immune response, just like the one I experienced that Saturday evening.”

Please click here to view Menios full article in ABC News online.