Five years after a misdiagnosed allergic reaction nearly killed her 15-year-old son, Myfanwy Webb carries a quiet, heavy regret, looking back at the birthday lunch that set off a chain of missed warnings. Hours after the celebration, Jeremy Webb, a lifelong asthma sufferer, developed severe breathing trouble and vomiting. Paramedics rushed him to hospital, where clinicians flagged a possible meat allergy but ultimately chalked the episode up to an asthma flare-up, sending him home the next day without additional testing or a life-saving EpiPen.
“I made the wrong decision,” Webb said in an interview, reflecting that she should have pushed for more comprehensive testing. Had clinicians confirmed the reaction was anaphylaxis, her son would have left the hospital with the emergency adrenaline auto-injector that could have saved his life a little over a year later.
In June 2022, 16-year-old Jeremy died on a coastal camping trip north of Sydney, Australia, after eating a single beef sausage. The death was initially ruled an asthma attack, but a coroner’s inquest pushed by the Webb family delivered a final, groundbreaking ruling in February: Jeremy’s death was caused by tick-induced mammalian meat allergy (MMA), also known as alpha-gal syndrome. His death marks the first globally documented fatal case of MMA directly triggered by eating meat, shining a harsh new light on a little-understood, fast-growing allergy that public health experts warn poses an underrecognized deadly threat.
Decades before Jeremy’s death, in 2007, Australian allergist Professor Sheryl van Nunen first made the landmark connection between tick bites and MMA, after noticing a clear correlation between exposure and patient symptoms at her Sydney clinic. Australia’s east coast, particularly the region north of Sydney where Jeremy grew up surrounded by dense bushland, is one of only two confirmed global hotspots for the condition — the other is the southeastern United States, though cases have now been recorded on every continent where ticks live.
In Australia, MMA is caused by bites from the eastern paralysis tick, *Ixodes holocyclus*. Professor van Nunen explains that after two bites, half of all people develop antibodies to alpha-gal, a sugar molecule found in tick saliva. Once sensitized, 15 to 20% of these people develop an allergic reaction to red meat and other mammalian products.
Tick expert Dr. Alex Gofton, who recently led a major study into MMA’s spread in Australia, says there are several leading hypotheses for why the east coast has become such a concentrated hotspot. Over the past three decades, the population of tick-endemic coastal bush regions has grown dramatically, bringing more humans into regular contact with ticks. The 2020–2023 La Niña years, which brought record rainfall to eastern Australia, created ideal breeding conditions for tick populations, while the COVID-19 pandemic pushed thousands of city residents to relocate to regional bush areas, further increasing exposure.
Diagnosed cases of MMA have risen 22% annually in Australia since 2000, and Dr. Gofton’s research using national lab data confirms more than 5,000 confirmed and suspected cases across the country — a figure he says is a massive undercount of the true prevalence of the condition. In some hotspot areas, rates exceed 700 cases per 100,000 people.
Despite the growing spread, diagnosing MMA remains notoriously difficult. Symptoms typically develop three to six hours after eating red meat, meaning they often appear overnight, long after most people have finished their evening meal. For asthma sufferers, anaphylaxis symptoms are frequently mistaken for an asthma attack, as was the case with Jeremy, and the allergy is unpredictable: reactions do not happen after every exposure, and severity varies wildly based on factors including the cut of meat, how it is cooked, whether the person drinks alcohol with the meal, exercises after eating, or is sleep deprived. Professor van Nunen calls MMA an “anytime but not every time allergy.”
For people with severe hypersensitivity, even indirect exposure can trigger life-threatening anaphylaxis. Sensitized people can react to mammalian derivatives ranging from cow’s milk and gelatin to lanolin in beauty products and laundry softeners, and even stearic acid found in some supermarket plastic bags. Fumes from cooking red meat at barbecues, or close contact with domestic pets that have eaten mammal-based pet food, can also trigger reactions.
Elizabeth Rowley, a mother of three living in the New South Wales mid-north coast, spent more than 15 years seeking a diagnosis for a mysterious set of symptoms that included memory loss, chronic brain fog, chest pain, full-body aches, and frequent fainting from breathing difficulties. Many clinicians dismissed her symptoms as hypochondria, telling her “it’s not anaphylaxis, get over it.”
“It was just mentally horrendous more than anything, just trying to find out what it was. I thought I was going crazy,” Rowley said. After finally receiving an MMA diagnosis, she launched a popular Facebook support group for undiagnosed and misdiagnosed sufferers. For many, the condition upends every part of daily life: Rowley was forced to leave multiple bookkeeping jobs after workplace triggers, from restaurant fumes in shopping centers to a boss’s daily morning toast with butter, triggered constant severe reactions. Social events like barbecues and restaurant dinners, core parts of Australian community life, are often off-limits, making casual gathering nearly impossible.
For 23-year-old Sydney psychology student Remy Williams, who was diagnosed with MMA as a child, the constant need for vigilance around food triggered an eating disorder. She says the most traumatic experience was watching her mother, who also lives with MMA, suffer two near-fatal anaphylactic attacks on commercial flights, one of which almost killed her in front of Remy. “It was incredibly scary,” she said.
Professor van Nunen’s greatest public health concern is the 85% of people who have developed alpha-gal antibodies — meaning they are sensitized to MMA — but have never experienced a reaction after eating meat, and have no idea they carry the allergy. These asymptomatic sensitized people are still at risk of life-threatening anaphylaxis from medical products containing mammalian derivatives, including gelatin-based vaccines and some cancer treatments. At least two confirmed deaths have already been linked to these hidden triggers: one colon cancer patient died after anaphylaxis triggered by the drug cetuximab, and another died after a blood transfusion contaminated with alpha-gal. Professor van Nunen says the true number of MMA-related deaths is far higher than officially recorded, with only two cases well-documented to date: an American commercial pilot who died after eating a hamburger in 2024, and Jeremy Webb.
Professor van Nunen notes a critical takeaway from Jeremy’s death: 94.8% of people who die from food allergy-induced anaphylaxis have pre-existing asthma, and the allergic reaction triggers a severe, rapid-onset asthma attack called status asthmaticus that can cause respiratory arrest in as little as four minutes without emergency intubation.
Since her son’s death, Myfanwy Webb has turned her grief into action, drawing on Jeremy’s own famously positive approach to life to drive public health change. “He fitted everything into it, wouldn’t waste a minute,” Webb said of her son, who loved restoring old car motors. Today, she is working to raise global awareness of MMA, improve clinical diagnostic protocols, and prevent other families from enduring the same loss. She has collaborated with the hospital that misdiagnosed Jeremy to develop new clinician training for MMA, and is co-authoring a research paper with Professor van Nunen that will be presented at an international allergy conference later this year.
“Now Jeremy’s positive spin is actually helping people, even though he’s passed,” Webb said. “I think he’d be really pleased with us.”
Public Health Guidance to Prevent Tick Bites and MMA:
1. When visiting bushland or tick-endemic areas, wear long clothing, tuck socks into trousers, and choose light-colored fabrics to make ticks easier to spot quickly
2. Avoid lying or picnicking directly on bare ground
3. Use EPA-approved insect repellents containing DEET or picaridin
4. Check your entire body (and your pets) for ticks after spending time in tick territory
5. If bitten by a tick, follow the “freeze don’t squeeze” rule: use a commercial tick-killing spray to kill the tick and let it detach on its own, rather than squeezing it with tweezers, which can force additional toxins and alpha-gal into the bloodstream