Medicine Grand Rounds - Suddenly Meatless: How Tick Bites and Reactions to Red Meat are Changing the Paradigm of Food Allergy

Dartmouth Health Continuing Education for Professionals Home, Medicine Grand Rounds - Suddenly Meatless: How Tick Bites and Reactions to Red Meat are Changing the Paradigm of Food Allergy, 7/10/2020 8:00:00 AM - 7/10/2023 9:00:00 AM, Dr. Commins tells the story of how a mysterious allergy afflicting people living in the southern United States developed into the study of alpha-gal, a carbohydrate, which was described as a novel food allergen in red meat in 2009. Patients appear to develop an alpha-gal allergy after tick bites and, unique among IgE-mediated food allergies, have reactions that are delayed 3-6 hours after eating red meat. Dr, Commins describes how to manage this allergy in the acute and chronic phases and advises how to safely reintroduce meat into the diet.

Presenter
Scott P. Commins, MD, PhD
Associate Professor of Medicine & Pediatrics,
University of North Carolina School of Medicine

About our Presenter
Dr. Scott Commins completed his undergraduate studies at Wake Forest University and earned his MD and PhD from the Medical University of South Carolina. He completed an Internal Medicine residency at The University of Virginia, where he remained to complete a fellowship in Allergy and Clinical Immunology. Dr. Commins is currently at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he is a member of the food allergy initiative.

Learning Outcome(s)
Participants will be able to recognize a clinical history and risk factors consistent with alpha-gal syndrome, and discuss management options and a proper avoidance diet for patients with alpha-gal syndrome.

Disclosure
In accordance with the disclosure policy of Dartmouth-Hitchcock/Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth as well as standards set forth by the Accreditation Council on Continuing Medical Education and the Nursing Continuing Education Council standards set forth by the American Nurses Credentialing Center Commission on Accreditation, continuing medical education and nursing education activity director(s), planning committee member(s), speaker(s), author(s) or anyone in a position to control the content have been asked to disclose any financial relationship* they have to a commercial interest (any entity producing, marketing, re-selling, or distributing health care goods or services consumed by, or used on patients). Such disclosure is not intended to suggest or condone bias in any presentation, but is elicited to provide participants with information that might be of potential importance to their evaluation of a given activity.

The following Activity Physician Director(s), planning committee member(s), speaker(s), author(s) or anyone in a position to control the content have reported the following financial interest or relationship* with various companies/organizations. The Activity Director and Planning Committee member roles were resolved by altering the individual’s control over content about the products or services of the commercial interest by the Associate Dean for CME and the Department of Medicine Chair. The speaker potential conflict has been resolved by validating the activity content through independent peer review by Kelly Kieffer, MD. All potential conflict(s) were resolved.

* Kelly Kieffer, MD ~ her spouse is a consultant for OcculoBio. 

* Richard I. Rothstein, MD ~ has research support from Baranova (research grant to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center) and is on the Scientific Advisory Board for Allurion.

* Scott P. Commins, MD, PhD ~ is on the speakers' bureau for Genentech and is a topic author for Up-to-Date.

Other planning committee member(s), speaker(s), activity director(s), author(s) or anyone in a position to control the content for this program report no financial interest or relationship* with any company(ies) or organizations whose product may be germane to the content of their presentations.

*A “financial interest or relationship" refers to an equity position, receipt of royalties, consultantship, funding by a research grant, receiving honoraria for educational services elsewhere, or to any other relationship to a company that provides sufficient reason for disclosure, in keeping with the spirit of the stated policy.

Bibliographic Material
See presentation for bibliographic sources to allow for further study.