Brent Williams cannot eat a hamburger. A tick took that away from him.

Williams is a nutritionist in Kentucky. He has spent most of his life raising livestock on farms where ticks thrive. Ticks bit him for years.

In 2017 he ate a steak sandwich on a work trip. He had done that hundreds of times before. This time he got very sick.

He went to an allergist. The first question was about ticks.

"The very first visit, he asked me, 'Have you been bitten by a tick?' I just laughed and said, 'Sure, hundreds,'" Williams told The Associated Press.

He had alpha-gal syndrome. It is a red meat allergy you can catch from a tick bite.

Here is how it works. Beef and pork carry a sugar called alpha-gal. Humans do not have that sugar. A tick can carry it in its spit. When the tick bites you, the sugar gets in your blood. Your body treats it like an enemy. After that, red meat can make you sick.

The CDC says the symptoms usually hit 2 to 6 hours after a meal. Hives. Bad stomach pain. Throwing up. Trouble breathing. Some people go into shock. It can kill you.

Chicken is fine. So are turkey, eggs, fish and shrimp. Beef, pork, lamb and deer are not.

For Williams it went past the dinner plate. Even grill fumes were off limits. So was the gelatin in a pill.

"It's been eight years, but I still vividly remember how sick I was," he said.

Then his wife bought some ostrich meat online. He cooked an ostrich steak.

"The mouth feel, the taste, the texture, it brought me good memories," Williams said. As he put it, "there's only so many ways you can cook a chicken."

Ostrich meat is red. It is loaded with iron. AP reports it looks and tastes a lot like beef.

Four years ago a friend came to him with a business idea. W.D. King wanted to raise ostriches. Williams was in. He is now a partner at Alpha Roost Farms in Danville, Kentucky.

Ostriches come from Africa. They are the biggest birds on earth. They stand nine feet tall. They weigh more than 300 pounds.

The farm keeps more than 400 of them. It wants 700 by next year.

"People who haven't had a hamburger in six or seven years really want one," King said.

They pay for it, too. A pound of ground ostrich can run more than $20. Choice cuts can go past $40.

Leah Gibbs runs the Dry Branch Farm market in Danville. She sells cuts from the farm. "We have people that drive here from all over the state to get the ostrich," she said. "They are elated to have something that's an alternative to beef. I mean, it tastes exactly like beef."

Williams hears the same thing over and over.

"The people that have alpha-gal that I talked to that have tried an ostrich burger, most of them are almost in tears," he said. They tell him, "You just don't know how bad I missed this."

Texas is in this story too. Boyd Clark runs Clark Ostrich Farm. It sits about 90 miles northwest of Austin. He has raised the big birds since the 1980s. He has about 1,200 of them. He expects 50 percent more next year.

"We get calls weekly from various restaurants or even small stores in different parts of the country that you wouldn't think would even want to carry ostrich, but they're looking for it because they've got customers wanting it," Clark said.

The business has crashed before. Lots of people jumped in during the 1990s. Many of them did not know the birds.

"The U.S. producers that jumped both feet in in the '90s, they were all operating under the premise that these were 300-pound chickens," said Michael Lehman. He is vice president of the American Ostrich Association. He raises ostriches in Oregon.

Farmers packed them in tight, like chickens. Ostriches need room to run, Lehman said. Prices shot up. The whole thing fell apart.

Lehman says only about 10 to 15 big ostrich farms are left today.

The allergy is going the other way. A 2023 government report counted about 100,000 Americans with it. AP reported that experts think the real number may be closer to half a million. CDC researchers logged 90,018 suspected cases from 2017 through 2022.

So why should the Valley care?

The bug blamed for it is the lone star tick. The CDC says that tick is the one most often tied to this allergy here. Most cases turn up in Southern, Eastern and Central states. That is where the tick lives.

Texas A&M lists the lone star tick among the tick species found in Texas. It likes woods with thick brush. It likes creek banks and river banks. UT Southwestern says the tick is getting more common in North Texas.

The Texas health department lists other tick illnesses on its website. Lyme disease is on that page. Alpha-gal is not. So there is no state count to point to.

El Tejano wrote about this tick in July. You can read that story here: https://www.eltejanorgv.com/one-tick-bite-can-destroy-your-love-for-meat-and-south-texas-has-that-tick/

Williams was not chasing a trend. He just wanted a burger again. Now he raises the birds that make one.