ANGLE INLET, Minn. — In September 2021, I wrote about Paul Colson, a third-generation owner of Jake’s Northwest Angle Resort and lifelong Northwest Angle resident, who in June of that year began getting sick every time he ate red meat.
The first incident occurred after eating some elk sausage.
“It was a gastrointestinal sort of thing,” Colson, who’s now 53, said at the time. “It wasn’t severe or anything, but it was like nausea, diarrhea, and I didn’t really think a whole lot of it.”
A couple of days later, Colson and his wife, Karen, grilled up some pork steak, and he got sick again, this time more intensely and with a rash. A beef steak several days later produced the same reaction, he recalls.
Something definitely wasn’t right.
Fatty meat seemed to produce the strongest reactions, Colson recalls, so he wondered if maybe he was having gallbladder trouble, since fatty foods are known to trigger flare-ups.
Then he got even sicker after eating some canned elk that had absolutely no fat.
Usually, it took 2½ to three hours before he’d get sick, Colson says; that time, the reaction occurred within 20 minutes.
“My throat had started to literally close up on me,” he said.
So much for the gallbladder theory.
Long story short, a doctor at Altru Clinic in Roseau, Minn., referred him to a specialist in Fargo, N.D., where Colson in September 2021 tested positive for alpha-gal syndrome, a tick-borne illness generally caused by the lone star tick, a species rarely seen in Minnesota and never documented on the Northwest Angle.
According to the Mayo Clinic website, alpha-gal syndrome results when a tick transmits a sugar molecule called alpha-gal into a person’s body. Animals such as cows and sheep carry the molecule in their blood, the website states, and if a tick that bites a mammal later bites a person, the immune response can produce mild to severe allergic reactions to red meat or other mammal products.
There’s also evidence that deer ticks may transmit alpha-gal syndrome. While the diagnosis came as a surprise, Colson says, the allergist told him there had been a few cases of the illness in the prairie lakes country of western Minnesota.
“I said, ‘Have you seen anybody get over it?’” Colson said. The allergist’s reply: No.
Colson and his wife then joined a private Facebook group that focuses on alpha-gal, where they learned that some people had had success with acupuncture.
The closest facility specializing in that particular type of acupuncture was in Northbrook, Ill., a Chicago suburb, so Colson later in September booked a round-trip flight from Duluth and flew to Chicago for the day.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, as the old saying goes.
“I flew there for an afternoon, and she did her little tests, and it felt so ridiculously hokey,” Colson said. “She put five little needles in my ear and gave me these two little bottles, they’re called sublingual sprays, that you spray on your tongue.”
Colson said he was told to keep the “tiny little needles,” which were only a couple of millimeters long, in his ear for a minimum of three weeks and preferably four.
“Honestly, it felt foolish,” he said. “I was thinking I should have brought along a chicken and a voodoo doll, and we’ll just kind of check off all the boxes.”
Despite the discomfort and inconvenience of having five small needles stuck in his ear for four weeks — at one point, he used super glue to hold the bandage in place — Colson followed the acupuncturist’s orders.
“I felt very skeptical, but I had to try something,” said Colson, who grew up eating venison and hunts deer, elk and other big game. “Just avoiding meat from a mammal is not a solution. It was just, ‘I’ve got to try something here.’”
After limiting his meat to grouse, chicken, waterfowl and fish, Colson in December 2021 fried up some venison and ate a piece about the size of his thumbnail.
There were no ill effects. He tried the same thing the next two days with similar results.
Colson ate a half-serving of red meat on the fourth day, and a full serving on day five.
“I had absolutely no reaction — none,” he said. “And I thought, ‘Wow, holy cow!’ Because honestly, it was a little emotional for me because I grew up on (venison) and not to be able to eat it was really tough.
“And I can say if you have to eat turkey bacon, it’s not worth it.”
Believe what you want about acupuncture, Colson says, but it worked for him. He’s back to eating venison and other red meat without any issues. Colson still has no idea how he contracted the illness, since he is conscientious about ticks when in the woods and didn’t have any bites that spring.
“From the time I first started reacting to the time I was eating meat again was approximately six months,” he said. “And literally nobody gets over alpha-gal in six months — that just doesn’t happen.”
