COLUMBIA, Ky.—After a four-wheeler ride with her husband, Mackie Jo Pennington sat on her aunt’s porch, not noticing the tiny dots on her pant leg.
As it turned out, those dots were poppy-seed-sized ticks associated with the nymph stage.
“I pulled 116 off me when we got home,” she recalled. “They were teeny-tiny little.”
She believes that Sunday evening in September 2008 changed her life forever.
Pennington began feeling sick and could no longer eat red meat. Years passed before she was diagnosed with alpha-gal syndrome, a red-meat allergy caused by a tick bite.
The syndrome was uncommon when Pennington was diagnosed in 2014. Today, it’s considered one of the fastest-growing tick-borne illnesses in the country….