The borax challenge was never just a dangerous TikTok trend.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only; the writers are not recommending drinking Borax. Just don’t.
The video has all the emblems of someone sharing their recipe for a nutritious smoothie: ingredients laid out on the counter, captions touting their health benefits. But Leah Anduiza, who posts on TikTok as @thetruthaboutparasites, is not telling her 47,000 followers to add a little spinach to a fruit smoothie for an extra boost of iron. Instead, she’s making a solution of borax and water, a concoction she says she drinks daily with her morning coffee.
Borax is a chemical compound containing boron that’s sold as a laundry detergent or cleaning agent. Ingesting it can cause vomiting and diarrhea. Drinking it or bathing in it can cause skin rashes. Take borax for long enough and you could end up with anemia, according to the National Capital Poison Center. But in several online enclaves, borax is one of many dubious substances in the medicine cabinet of misinformation, touted as a cure for everything from arthritis to cancer. Drinking borax is not a new phenomenon. But on TikTok, it became a trend.
The #boraxchallenge has more than 34 million views and counting on TikTok. Click on the hashtag and it’s not difficult to find videos of people sharing their “journey” of ingesting laundry detergent. And if you spend enough time looking at these videos, TikTok will feed you even more.
“I simply add it to my lemon water every morning,” one TikTok user says in a video with 20,000 views, as she showed herself squeezing lemon juice into a bright green cup as cheerful music plays in the background. “Just a pinch or two a day.” Todd Mendlesohn, a former bodybuilder with 25,000 followers on TikTok, promised his audience that a “pre-workout” drink of borax, baking soda, and Celtic sea salt would give them “the biggest pump on the planet.” That video has more than 150,000 views.
These kinds of popular health-adjacent TikTok videos tend to be imbued with a sense of accessibility. If the person showing their recipe for a health drink says it made them feel better, maybe it’ll also work for you. That sentiment can swiftly lead to dangerous trends, in which the individual videos shake off the context in which they were created, bursting in and out of view with a quickness that avoids deep examination. And this is exactly why health misinformation works so well on TikTok. But as the platform’s collective attention moves on to the next trend, real people can still get hurt.
Melissa, who posts on TikTok as @athenavondusseldorf and declined to give her full name out of concerns about harassment, was hopeful when she saw a TikTok video recommending borax water. “I’m in a desperate amount of pain and I have been jumping through hoops with doctors for 8 years trying to get some relief,” she said in a DM, explaining that she’s been diagnosed with a painful spinal condition. A TikTok video — she can’t remember which one she saw first — prompted her to do more research. She found a YouTube video of a woman who replaced her toothpaste with borax. Google results led her to an article on the NIH website about the potential benefits of boron supplements. She bought some borax and mixed a teaspoon into her water bottle — a dosage she settled on after watching how much TikTokers were adding to their concoctions. She drank borax water for two days before posting her own TikTok video about the experience that’s titled “I poisoned myself.”
“I had to call out of work. I was throwing up. I had such a headache that I felt like my brain was swelling,” Melissa said in the video. She knew better, she said. Her instincts were telling her that drinking laundry detergent was a bad idea. But she was in a lot of pain, her doctors weren’t helping, and it seemed like so many other people had tried borax with great results.
The latest dangerous internet challenge
Some people are calling the borax challenge “the Tide Pod challenge for boomers,” referencing the 2018 moral panic about teens filming themselves eating Tide Pods for social media clout. There’s a delicious irony in this framing: While the panic about the Tide Pod challenge vastly outpaced the rather limited popularity of the so-called trend among actual teens at the time, it’s easy to establish that a bunch of adults really are filming themselves preparing and drinking borax. But upon closer examination, the comparison has deeper cracks: Enterprising internet users are actually trying to monetize the borax challenge.
The borax challenge is part of a cottage industry of health misinformation that extends beyond TikTok. But thanks to TikTok’s trend culture, the people making money by pushing these dangerous tips and treatments are finding a new audience that’s ultimately being directed to an established network of snake oil salespeople and miracle cure peddlers spread across the internet.
Misinformation also benefits from the cycle of a controversial social media trend. First, the idea gains attention, and as the trend spreads, its dubious claims draw outrage that leads to video removals. Eventually, the platform cracks down, which simply emboldens the trend’s loyal followers with the idea that “they” are trying to censor the truth.
It’s tricky to track the impact of trends like this, said Rachel Moran, who studies health misinformation as a postdoc scholar at the University of Washington. “Especially when the trend involves ingesting a substance that is typically thought of as toxic, it’s unclear how many people who show interest online will actually perform the behavior offline,” she said. “People may be more inclined to try drinking borax if they can post about it online and go viral, but similarly the everyday non-posting user watching the video may see it as a trend fit only for (wannabe) influencers.”
As people saw — and researched — the practice of drinking borax, they stumbled into an existing network that had been promoting the practice for years. On Facebook, there’s a private group with more than 40,000 members devoted to ingesting or bathing in borax. Recent posts are filled with requests for advice on dosage from people who want to start drinking borax after seeing it online. Some of those who have started their borax “journey” even ask for help dealing with the fallout.
“I have an awful aftertaste, and my mouth is dry,” wrote one user after drinking borax for the first time. Others asked for advice, including dosage, for giving borax to their children and their pets. In another recent post, an anonymous member asked for advice after their mother soaked in borax water. “She’s been throwing up since 2:00am,” the anonymous poster wrote. She was not drinking water. “I’m worried cause she’s almost 86 …” Someone replied, “She’s detoxing. That’s good.” An administrator for the group declined to answer questions.
TikTok told Vox that it didn’t believe drinking borax was a trend on their platform and that the majority of videos posted on the topic were by people trying to debunk it. Many of the most popular videos promoting borax consumption have since been removed, either by the creator of the video or by TikTok moderators. Many of the removals seem to coincide with increased media attention to the phenomenon at the end of last week, as popular TikTok creators called out and condemned the presence of these videos on the app. TikTok’s community guidelines ban videos that promote dangerous practices, including viral challenges.
Anduiza, the influencer who helped kick-start the borax trend on TikTok several months ago, has paused posting about borax on her TikTok account, and her popular borax recipe video was removed by TikTok for violating their misinformation rules. And yet, she has since been using her social media presence to funnel people to other platforms. Her personal website advertises free and paid advice on undergoing a “parasite detox” that includes ingesting borax, and directs people to the products she sells, including a holistic wellness multi-level marketing scheme called Amare. She also steers people to her 6,000-member private Facebook group and to an Amazon page where she earns affiliate links when people buy the detox products she recommends, including borax. Anduiza did not return multiple requests for comment.
Why misinformation thrives on TikTok
Personal anecdotes from those who “cured” themselves of the incurable have long been health misinformation’s most powerful currency. For years, these testimonials have been shared in private Facebook groups, cheerful Instagram posts, and slickly produced YouTube videos, in targeted advertisements and in Google results. But TikTok is an anecdote-amplifying machine. On TikTok, reaching a huge audience of well-meaning viewers can be as simple as telling a good story, backed by the right music and lighting.
To Casey Fiesler, an associate professor at the University of Colorado who studies online communities, the borax challenge videos were reminiscent of viral TikTok recipes. Instead of dropping a block of feta in a pan and roasting it with tomatoes, however, they’re romanticizing drinking borax as part of a wellness lifestyle. And as those videos find an audience, they become embedded in the structure of TikTok’s algorithmic incentives to keep engaging with content. Once it’s embedded, the pathways toward misinformation multiply.
One video with nearly 2 million views, posted in June and still available on TikTok, claims to unveil the “borax conspiracy” by rehashing the arguments of a 2012 article by the same name that claims “Big Pharma” is covering up the benefits of drinking borax. At the top of the video, TikTok has displayed a suggested search for “Borax health benefits” that led to a river of videos promoting the benefits of ingesting borax. TikTok’s search results have also included a list of related search terms “benefits of borax for dogs,” “can dogs ingest borax for health benefits,” “borax benefits for arthritis,” “benefits of borax for men.”
“It fits the mold of what becomes popular on the platform: ‘alternative’ health advice that is cheap, accessible, and explained through a scientific-adjacent explanation that feels familiar,” said Moran, the misinformation expert.
Not all of those trends are explicitly harmful. Things like the “sleepy girl mocktail” and the “internal shower” are mostly guilty of overstating the benefits of a food or supplement that is safe to eat, according to Moran. And as these topics spread to people outside of their intended audience, there’s often a counter trend of outrage that turns up the volume.
“An interesting thing about TikTok is that the content that gets spread a lot isn’t necessarily the content that people like,” said Fiesler. “It gains a foothold with both the audience who agrees with it and wants to believe it, and the audience who doesn’t believe it and knows that it’s misinformation and wants to warn people.”
What can be done about the challenge cycle?
Addressing misinformation online generally is tricky. TikTok’s cultural swiftness certainly doesn’t help. “When these ‘new’ trends go viral, the conversation intensifies and then dissipates so quickly it’s hard for us to grasp how and when the information became important,” said Moran. Things go from “new” to deeply familiar so quickly that it’s hard to find room for even well-meaning audiences to question their veracity. While some of the most widely shared borax-drinking videos on TikTok were removed, new videos promoting the practice are still being posted and finding audiences.
This is what Chem Thug, an account run by a chemistry PhD candidate and their wife, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid harassment, set out to address. In mid-July, they posted a supercut of TikTok creators enthusiastically undertaking the “borax challenge” as word of the trend spread. The compilation was intended to be shocking to their 175,000 followers and communicate that yes, people really are drinking borax. In fact, some people have been posting videos of themselves drinking borax on TikTok for months, or even years. Then, Chem Thug hops on camera to warn viewers against drinking laundry detergent. “Don’t eat shit out of the f-ing laundry box, people!” the video says before walking through a review of scientific literature on the dangers of ingesting borax.
Chem Thug’s video quickly gained nearly 2 million views.
“I am a firm believer in good faith at first,” Chem Thug said in an interview. “I try to find the kernel of truth from which sprouted all the lies, you know? I like to believe that if they’re given accurate information or as close to accurate information as possible, they’ll come to the logical conclusion.”
For a time, Chem Thug’s video was among the top results on TikTok for searches related to borax, which was part of the purpose of making it. Chem Thug knew the attention would die down eventually, but not the presence of this dangerous misinformation on TikTok. Months from now, they hope that someone searching for borax’s health benefits might see this video instead.
Then Chem Thug ran into a major obstacle to their work addressing TikTok’s misinformation trends: TikTok’s moderation practices. Just before their video hit 2 million views, the platform removed it for violating its rules, sending a message to the Chem Thug account that it flagged its content for promoting dangerous activities. TikTok restored the video six days later.
The trend cycle had advanced. The dangerous borax challenge sparked outrage, which led to attention and media coverage and that ultimately drew action from TikTok’s moderators — which wasn’t always directed at the right users. Even without intervention by moderators, TikTok trends don’t last very long, and the borax challenge will fade away, just like almost everything else that bursts into popularity on the app. But soon something else will trend that is dangerous or misleading or nonsense, and the spotlight will turn in that direction.
The experience was frustrating for Chem Thug. “I’m out here trying to tell people how to not kill themselves,” they said. “You know what I mean?”
Meanwhile, new members continued to flock to the Facebook group that promotes drinking borax. One recent post simply asks, “Is it safe to start taking borax while breastfeeding?”
Then, that afternoon, the Facebook group was no longer available to view. When asked why, an administrator replied, they’d “decided to pause the group till all this TikTok stuff settles down.”
Abby Ohlheiser is a freelance reporter and editor who writes about technology, religion, and culture. Their work has appeared previously on Vox and in the Washington Post, Mashable, the Revealer, the New Humanist, Slate, and the Columbia Journalism Review, among other places. They have an MA in religious studies and journalism from New York University and a book in the works on American evangelicalism and far-right media.
Is it time to celebrate the economy’s “soft landing” yet?
The US economy is looking good. A “soft landing” — getting last year’s skyrocketing inflation under control without a recession — appears increasingly plausible. All of its structural inequities largely persist, of course, but wages are strong, unemployment is low, and the economy is still growing. The Federal Reserve is no longer projecting the US will enter a recession in the near term.
It’s worth remembering just how unlikely this all seemed a year ago. As the Federal Reserve started to hike interest rates to try to fight inflation, many commentators regarded some kind of a recession as a fait accompli. After all, if you look at the history, an inflation crisis has usually required an economic downturn, which means a lot of people losing their jobs and feeling financial pain, in order to get prices under control.
It’s too early to declare victory. Inflation is still not as low as the Fed would like. But the US economy is outperforming most of its peers in both productive growth and slowing inflation.
So how did we get here? I endeavored to find out and find a way to tell the story of the past 18 months for those of us who might not intuitively know that an inverting of the yield curve can predict a recession until we read a Vox explainer on the subject. (TL;DR: When yields on short-term Treasury bonds are higher than those of long-term bonds, this is an inversion of the typical pattern and implies investors are anticipating a recession.)
To be clear, the landing could still get bumpy. US-China trade tensions could flare up. We may not have heard the last of weaknesses in the banking sector exposed by Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse. Another unexpected disaster, geopolitical or natural, can never be ruled out. And the gridlock in Washington could make it more difficult to respond if such a thing occurs.
But, the bottom line is, according to Dana Peterson, chief economist at the Conference Board, who recently briefed President Joe Biden on the economy: “The likelihood of recession has lessened, and the likelihood of soft landing has increased.”
No single explanation will suffice and economists still disagree about what exactly is driving the gears of the economy. But I spoke with a handful of leading experts. Here are three theories that, taken together, explain how the US might pull this off.
- Pandemic-related economic disruptions have dissipated
The shock that the Covid-19 pandemic sent through the economy in the spring of 2020 was unprecedented. But even as economic activity picked back up in the months to come, it was not the pre-pandemic economy. Spending habits changed.
Instead of buying a gym membership, people bought a Peloton for their home. Some people moved to a new house in a new neighborhood and, rather than ride on public transportation as they had, they purchased cars, maybe a used car, to adjust to their new post-pandemic life.
But at the same time, people were buying more of those goods — more Pelotons, more furniture, more home-based tech, more cars — the supply chains for those products were being disrupted by the pandemic. Production stopped or slowed as factories shut down. Trade dropped considerably and prices rose in response given the high demand, the first step toward an inflation crisis. Housing prices were soaring as people decided to move; at the same time, new construction was hobbled by supply constraints.
“It’s almost like wartime change in the composition of demand,” Josh Bivens, chief economist of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, told me. “We tried to shove a bunch of that demand into sectors whose global supply chains were collapsing because of Covid.”
Meanwhile, the service side of the economy largely collapsed and 22 million people lost their jobs in a very short time.
There was something unusual about this period of historically high unemployment: Many workers still had a lot of cash, thanks to the pandemic relief bills passed by Congress. Even as the economy started reopening and businesses tried to rapidly hire back many of the people they had laid off, workers could be choosy. Research has found that people who have more savings tend to take longer to find work. It makes intuitive sense too.
And if somebody lost their job for whatever reason, there were plenty of other positions available. That combination of low unemployment and plentiful job openings is unusual, and it propped up workers but also helped create the inflation crisis. People who have more money tend to spend more money and, given Covid’s constraints on supply, that is also going to increase prices.
This apparent overheating was at its peak last summer when, at the same time, the Russian invasion of Ukraine had led to energy prices skyrocketing. The US was looking at 9 percent inflation, and the Fed, which up to that point had also regarded
But Bivens and other experts I spoke to said that they believed these effects were always going to be transitory. As the economy got further away from the disruptions of the past few years, inflation would slow naturally, without intervention.
The slowdown in housing prices in particular, and their secondary effects, take a long time to show up in inflation data. Consumer spending was also bound to cool off. Peterson said she has been surprised by the persistence of consumers’ “revenge spending” — people spending on travel and other entertainment after a few years in which that was practically impossible. One theory for why: Goods people pay for on a credit card are not as exposed to rate hikes as a loan on a car or a major purchase — but she also said that spending would inevitably ease as people start to run out of their excess savings from the pandemic.
One major financial firm’s forecasting team said they attributed about 40 percent of price increases last year to these transitory factors. That still left an inflation problem, but a more modest one than the headline numbers would have suggested.
- The labor market has been gradually normalizing
Supply chain problems were not something the Fed was equipped to deal with, and those factors have largely been normalizing on their own. The roaring labor market, however, was a more obvious target for the Fed’s fiscal policy once inflation became unpalatable.
Here is why many experts saw a soft landing as difficult to pull off: The Federal Reserve had made clear it was going to raise rates, because inflation had reached untenable levels and something had to be done, and it’s hard to control the effects of those rate increases. The expectation is that they will lead to a slowdown in business and consumer spending, which leads to layoffs, which leads to less spending. That’s how you end up in a recession.
But the labor market has proven stubbornly resistant: More than 200,000 jobs were added in June, and unemployment stayed stuck at 3.6 percent despite a year of rate hikes.
Part of the explanation is that certain sectors — such as health care, business services, and entertainment — are still rehiring from their losses during the pandemic. Companies have also been holding on to workers. Peterson told me her company’s recent surveys of CEOs have found executives were expecting a recession, but they expected it to be mild, so they were less interested in preemptively making cuts.
The abundance of job openings also prevented a jump in unemployment, even as interest rates started to rise. Usually, when somebody loses a job, they have to cut back on their spending, which then has more knock-on effects: Less consumer spending leads to more layoffs leads to less spending. That’s why the unemployment rate tends to rise sharply in a short period, if you look back at historical trends.
But lately, it’s been so easy for people to find work that we haven’t set off the vicious chain reaction that can lead to a recession. Instead, companies have been cutting back on their job openings over the past year (from 11,400 in May 2022 to 9,800 in May 2023) more gradually. The labor market has been settling down, rather than all crashing down.
And with job openings gradually decreasing, wage growth has also been cooling. The fear was that low employment would keep driving wages higher, which would keep pushing prices up. That potentially toxic combination of prices and wages rising together led to the Fed’s initial decision to increase interest rates.
But after peaking last spring, nominal wage growth has steadily come down, from 5.8 percent in April 2022 to 4.4 percent in June 2023. Historically healthy, but more in line with the pre-pandemic trend lines.
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Economic Policy Institute
This was the goal, the controlled — or “soft” — landing out of last year’s inflation crisis that the Fed was aiming for but many people didn’t think it could pull off. The fear was that the economy couldn’t move in this gradual way, that once the Fed kicked things off with a rate hike, the labor market would spin downward until we hit a recession.
But instead, propped up by some of the unusual features of the post-pandemic, a soft landing is in sight. One other factor deserves credit, odd enough: the American consumer.
- People didn’t freak out
The economy is really humanity as a macroorganism. All of our individual habits and our expectations feed off one another, creating reality as much as experiencing it. That is why, once people started to expect a recession amid the inflation crisis, there was a fear that it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy no matter the Fed’s aim for a soft landing. People and businesses who are expecting a recession tend to spend less, which leads to layoffs, which leads to less spending.
Likewise, expectations of inflation can lead to more inflation. Businesses preemptively increase prices, and a similar spiral gets underway.
But, despite an initial false alarm that contributed to the Fed’s decision to intervene last summer, Americans’ expectations about long-term inflation were always pretty low. People expected inflation to be high in the short term, but not in the long term, according to the University of Michigan’s consumer survey. Even short-term expectations have normalized in the past few months, after running hot for most of last year.
Why did we keep our heads? Some experts see it as a long-term win for fiscal policy. After the stagflation crisis of the 1970s and 80s, the prime directive for central banks has been to keep inflation in check. Consumers, therefore, have come to expect low inflation. So even though inflation took off in the wake of the pandemic, it may have been easier for people to accept it would be temporary, because they’ve become accustomed to low inflation as the default state of the economy.
And because consumers and businesses weren’t panicking, the Federal Reserve didn’t have to either. One forecaster at a major financial firm described the effect this way: Early on, financial leaders were saying that inflation likely wouldn’t get down to target levels until 2025 because they thought it would be exceedingly difficult to wrangle the beast. A lot of economic pain, engineered by the Fed itself, would be necessary in the meantime.
But over time, the premise behind a 2025 timeline has shifted. With inflation cooling off while the economy still looks healthy, the Fed can afford to take the more gradual approach. Everybody is keeping calm and carrying on.
“If the economy is doing really well, inflation is going in the right direction, let that ride,” Bivens said. “Don’t mess with it.”
Why cases of alpha-gal syndrome are on the rise.
Very little can stop the average American from eating beef — and quite a lot of it. On a per-capita basis, Americans eat nearly 60 pounds of red meat a year, equivalent to more than one quarter-pound hamburger every other day. But there’s one obstacle to our meat-loving tendencies that may not be surmountable: the tiny but aggressive lone star tick.
The tick (named for the female’s distinctive white dot on its back) can spread something called sugar alpha-gal via its spit. That sugar can trigger alpha-gal syndrome, or AGS, a condition that causes hives, nausea, heartburn, diarrhea, difficulty breathing, and a drop in blood pressure, among other symptoms, in sufferers around two to six hours after they eat beef, pork, and other mammal products. Essentially, sufferers become severely allergic to red meat.
Since researchers first linked the syndrome to ticks in 2011, there have been more than 110,000 suspected cases. But new research released on Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that the true number of sufferers between 2010 and 2022 may be as high as 450,000 people.
“I think those of us who live in it never thought the number was actually that low,” Dr. Jeffrey Wilson, an allergist and immunologist with the University of Virginia Health system, said of the confirmed number of cases. “I think the CDC report is one of the first, best attempts to get a good idea of what the real epidemiology of alpha-gal is.”
If accurate, the CDC’s AGS estimates would place an allergy to red meat as the 10th most common food allergy in the country, Dr. Scott Commins, a co-author of the CDC papers on AGS and a University of North Carolina researcher, told the Associated Press.
AGS does not always last for life, and is manageable by avoiding red meat, but if unaddressed it can be more than just a dietary nuisance — it can be deadly. “If a severe allergic reaction occurs, this can potentially be life-threatening,” Commins wrote Vox in an email. “We refer to that as anaphylaxis and numerous reports of anaphylaxis from AGS exist … Many patients carry an epinephrine auto-injector (epi-pen) for emergency situations.”
In the CDC’s press release, Ann Carpenter, an epidemiologist with the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the CDC and lead author of one of the papers released Thursday, said, “Alpha-gal syndrome is an important emerging public health problem, with potentially severe health impacts that can last a lifetime for some patients … It’s critical for clinicians to be aware of AGS so they can properly evaluate, diagnose, and manage their patients and also educate them on tick-bite prevention to protect patients from developing this allergic condition.”
Don’t panic just yet
Given the potential severity of AGS, the CDC’s reports raised clear alarm bells. One of the papers reported a spike in positive, lab-confirmed AGS cases, rising from 13,371 in 2017 to 18,885 in 2021. (The larger number of up to 450,000 cases in the CDC report is an estimate, based on a survey of health care professionals.) Additionally, while the lone star tick was previously found primarily in the South, the CDC report revealed that Suffolk County, New York, and Bedford County, Virginia, actually have the highest number of suspected AGS cases.
But scientists are still in the early stages of getting a fix on AGS. “Studying [AGS] is hard. I think for the most part, we’re just getting a better understanding of where the syndrome actually is,” Wilson said. “Is it slowly expanding or moving? It may be. In that study, Suffolk County, New York, lit up. But I think what that mostly tells us is that there are a lot of lone star ticks in Long Island. It’s not a brand new development, there’ve been a lot of lone star ticks on Long Island for some time.”
Some of the confusion may come down to just how unknown AGS is in the medical world — a second set of CDC findings showed that many health care workers remain uninformed about the syndrome. Forty-two percent of 1,500 surveyed general practitioners, internists, pediatricians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants reported they did not know what AGS was. Thirty-five percent of the respondents reported they could not confidently diagnose or manage the syndrome.
But given the regionality of the illness, this shouldn’t be too concerning. “There’s a lot of parts of this country where you’re just not going to see [AGS], or it’s going be very rare,” said Wilson of the illness. “I think it’s almost not surprising that you’re going to have primary providers in many parts of the country who just aren’t going to know much about alpha-gal, or aren’t going to feel comfortable dealing with it.”
Another reason for the inability of health care providers to accurately diagnose the illness could be the delayed onset of the condition in relation to the food that causes the reaction, said Commins. Someone with AGS may not develop hives or gastrointestinal symptoms until hours after they’ve eaten red meat.
Additionally, not everyone who tests positive for the alpha-gal antibody will develop a red meat allergy, said Wilson. “It’s necessary, but not sufficient,” he said. The number of people who test positive for the blood marker is higher than the number who actually experience the symptoms of the syndrome.
Still, the higher number of estimated AGS cases aligns with a worrying increase in other tick-borne illnesses. As of 2018, ticks accounted for 77 percent of reported vector-borne diseases in the US, according to the CDC. Lyme disease accounted for 82 percent of the reported cases — between 1991 and 2018 Lyme disease cases per 100,000 people nearly doubled from 3.74 to 7.21 reported cases — and the report also showed a rise in spotted fever rickettsioses, babesiosis, and anaplasmosis cases.
Ironically, increased forest coverage because of reforestation efforts and a reduction in farming and a growing deer population (a major food source for many kinds of ticks) could be driving the trend. “Ticks that have made the biggest moves over the last few decades are those that rely heavily on deer as a reproductive host,” Thomas Mather, a professor and disease ecologist at the University of Rhode Island, previously told Vox’s Benji Jones.
What can we do about alpha-gal syndrome?
No treatment or cure for AGS exists. Therefore, the best way to protect oneself involves avoiding tick bites altogether. The CDC recommends doing so by wearing an EPA-registered insect repellant and long pants and socks while outdoors. Once inside, put your clothes in the dryer on high heat for 10 minutes, shower, and check yourself and your pets for the bugs.
And if you do discover a tick, removing it the proper way can save you from some types of tick-borne illnesses, including Lyme disease, which usually requires a tick to be attached to a person for between 36 to 48 hours to spread.
Use tweezers to hold the tick where it’s attached to your skin and steadily pull upwards. Afterward, clean the area. The CDC does not recommend using any other method for removal.
The more tick bites you get, the more likely you’ll experience prolonged AGS symptoms. So, even if you’ve already been bitten once, it’s not too late to start protecting yourself.
“Alpha-gal certainly in some of our patients can wane over time … for people who continue to get more tick bites it’s less likely to go away,” said Wilson. “For people who change their habits and do things to be more proactive about avoiding ticks, it’s more likely to go away over time.”