Burkhard Bilger

speaker

670 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Burkhard Bilger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The MeatEater Podcast · Ep. 908: The Lone Star Tick and Alpha Gal Syndrome · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

But it's in this, you know, and so, you know, we eat alpha-gal all the time.

We're eating meat all the time, and mostly we don't react to it.

So the question is, why do we?

And that still hasn't been totally figured out.

There's clearly something in the tick saliva, some kind of cofactor, that's not only, we're not only getting the alpha-gal, but it's triggering the immune reaction to the alpha-gal in the people who get it.

Yeah, I mean, and the crazy thing is that

most allergies are quick, right?

You get bitten by, you get stung by a bee and you react right away, you know?

But alpha-gal, it can take two to six hours to manifest.

And it seems to be because the alpha-gal itself is bound up in lipids and fats, or it's bound up in these connective tissues, and both of them, these kind of gluey connective tissues, and both of them take a long time to digest.

And so, you know, you're eating this stuff and

No reaction at all.

And then suddenly at three in the morning, you're starting to get terrible stomach cramps, or you might get shortness of breath, your throat's closing up, you're getting rashes or hives.

And people don't make the connection, right?

I mean, there was a study in 2017 that looked at 100 doctors visits of people who had alpha-gal syndrome and only one in 10 doctors identified it correctly.

And the people in that study, the median length to diagnosis was seven years.

So you think about people having these serious allergic reactions to the point of some of them are going into anaphylactic shock, you know, and they don't know.

And they go to the doctor and the doctor says, well, that might be a gluten allergy or I don't know, maybe you have some heart palpitations.

We need to do some heart things.

I talked to one guy who had three heart surgeries because they misdiagnosed alpha-galcine.

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