This tick can give you a life-threatening allergy. It’s spreading across the U.S.

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  This is In Conversation from Apple News.

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  I'm David Greene in for Shumita Basu.

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  Today, what to know about the tick-borne allergy spreading across the US.

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  It is peak tick season, the stretch from April to September

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  when tick activity spikes in huge swaths of the United States.

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  Right now, according to the CDC, Americans are visiting emergency rooms

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  for tick bites at the highest rate in nearly a decade.

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  And the most rapidly spreading tick-borne illness in the country

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  is something called Alpha-gal syndrome.

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  This is a condition that causes an often severe allergy to red meat and other animal products,

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  and it's primarily spread by a particularly aggressive species called the Lone Star tick.

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  They will actively hunt people down.

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  That is New Yorker staff writer Burkhard Bilger.

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  He recently reported on the rise of the Lone Star tick and Alpha-gal syndrome.

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  There have been reports of them actually crawling down from the dune grasses

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  and crossing the hot sand and getting onto beach blankets and biting people as they're sunbathing.

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  Lone Star ticks were once found mostly in the southeastern US, but they have been spreading,

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  turning up as far west as Texas and as far north as Maine and Michigan.

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  And wherever they go, they bring Alpha-gal along with them.

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  This syndrome can trigger a range of reactions after you eat meat or dairy,

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