You get used to diet modifications after a while, took me a year at least before I stopped 'mourning' my old diet so to speak. There's plenty of other delicious foods out there and it may go away eventually.
There's plenty of outdoor spaces that are treated for ticks prevention to enjoy too, to get the best of both worlds.
Tick saliva is meant to trick your body into not identifying it as a foreign object sucking your blood. So saliva, alpha-gal, and who knows what else is injected during the tick's feeding and that mixture is different than just eating food that when breaks down in digestion is turned into alpha gal.
It originates in a different place of your body (not from your gut) and has different components.
That's about the simplest I can explain the difference.
That sounds like a very extreme sensitivity to another food or maybe the timing was just coincidental and it was something they ate earlier. My and most people's alpha gal response is usually delayed by hours, supposedly due to food having to digest and break down food components into alpha-gal.
Another explanation is allergies and panic attacks also go hand in hand from what I've heard. Panic attacks cause breathing problems and can easily be confused with anaphylaxis or make real anaphylaxis even more terrifying than it already is. Feeling fear that a threat is ever present when you have any food allergy is real, but manageable.
Sorry your reactions are digestive :( I feel lucky to have skin hives only in response to this - worst being lips and tongue occasionally.
Ask your doctors to become educated on it, though I'm not sure it'll do much good to you it may help the next guy they see with AGS. Send them the nih.gov papers linked in these comments.
Mine was from one bite, it depends on the tick and maybe the person too. Some people get bit many times a year and don't get AGS or other tick borne illnesses. They're just lucky I guess
In response to the pharmacy link: I suffer from alpha-gal allergy and researched mRNA vaccine ingredients prior to getting the Moderna vaccine. I was perfectly fine. There's also a /r/alphagal reddit thread discussing the vaccine they got and reactions where the majority of people said the same.
Classic flu style vaccines like J&J's covid vaccine can use either a pig or chicken egg base - the pig being potentially risky for alpha-gal allergy sufferers and egg theoretically fine. I personally have just avoided the flu vaccine though may try it this year after confirming I can get the egg based one.
The other links are interesting...alpha gal and covid-19 are both very new afflictions which don't have much history of study yet. So I take that info with a grain of salt, though lets hope it leads to some breakthrough for treatment of either COVID19 or AGS.
Alpha-gal light sufferer here - light because my reactions are usually somewhat light hives, however I also have practiced avoidance nearly perfectly for years. I'll try to answer your questions, but I'm not a medical professional so this is not medical advice etc etc.
What to do in the meantime until the 30-days the allergy takes to develop? 100% avoidance of all things you mentioned would probably be safest.
Why avoid? There are many anecdotes of the allergy fading with enough time when you practice alpha-gal avoidance. So starting IMMEDIATELY and never having a post-tick bite alpha-gal reaction may stop reinforcing the behavior in your immune system even faster. That one theory of how this allergy supposedly fades with time, is its sort of forgotten and dropped from your immune 'defenses' but that maybe not right.
Regarding Dairy, I personally haven't had much problem with cheeses however high fat milks and sour cream kick my ass usually. More processed stuff like cream cheese surprisingly was ok. I believe I read other's online anecdotes supporting what my body has shown to be true also, cooked dairy is usually OK for whatever reason, a similar phenomenon to young kids dairy allergies where they can have it cooked in dishes. But again you may want to do 100% avoidance diet and slowly reintroduce, a standard allergy practice.
RE: cross contamination. Again I'm not a highly sensitive alpha-gal sufferer but I haven't had many issues with this. It would probably be a problem if someone used bacon grease to cook instead of a regular vegetable oil. I've stopped worrying too much about this when I dine/order out and have been OK. I put that energy making sure what I'm ordering doesn't have any hidden beef/pork like in broths of soups.
I wonder if completely abstaining from any red meat for a year would be enough to reduce whatever antibodies are being created to the point where you could eat red meat again.
Most anecdotes I read said the 8-15 year (I'm year 9) scale for the allergy to fade if at all, I don't recall what they said they had for reactions/accidental allergen dosages during their years though.
Accidental allergen exposures happen once in a while, as you get used to the diet and learn hidden sources of allergen, they happen less. There's been no point in time when I thought I had to test if the allergy had gone away yet because I can usually remember a recent small or big hive from the past year. Right now I think I'm at least 1.5 year without hives, probably thanks to quarantine forcing a more controlled diet.
Since about my second year of being allergic I've been very well adjusted to my fish/bird meat only diet and have no insatiable desire for a steak so I'm OK waiting another few years before purposefully trying anything dangerous.
More research is needed, my anecdotal experiences is that different people have wide differences in the way that they react to alpha gal.
I know someone who went into full anaphylaxis from inhaling aeroplane food on a flight, requiring both injectors, they were in their late 40s.
I know someone who was able to reintroduce cheese and that worked for them.
The variance and time to affect seems to vary depending on the person.
My ex partner has a reaction petting my dogs who've been running out in the yard rolling in wallaby poop.
It's bloody awful affliction :( It prevents you from being able to enjoy many activities that most people take for granted.
The good thing is bird is pretty versatile! Duck is amazing, where I live you can buy duck chortizo. Groups I've joined on Facebook that are USA based are doing Emu briskets!
My ex goes and gets a test every once in a while that measures some level that they can use to tell if it's getting better or worse.
The crazy thing is that the local schools ban peanut butter but a sausage sizzle as they're called here (cooking like 50 sausages at a time for a fundraisers) are all totally OK, despite the allergy being an ongoing issue for the local area (just like in the USA, it's localised).
