Sheryl van Nunen OAM

MBBS Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery ( la, Medicinae Baccalaureus, Baccalaureus Chirurgiae; abbreviated most commonly MBBS), is the primary medical degree awarded by medical schools in countries that follow the tradition of the United King ...

FRACP Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, abbreviated as the post-nominal initials FRACP, is a recognition of the completion of the prescribed postgraduate specialist training programme in internal adult or internal paediatric medicin ...

, is an Australian allergy researcher and Senior Staff Specialist in the Department of Clinical Immunology and Allergy at

Royal North Shore Hospital The Royal North Shore Hospital (RNSH) is a major public teaching hospital in Sydney, Australia, located in St Leonards. It serves as a teaching hospital for Sydney Medical School at the University of Sydney and has over 600 beds. It is the prin ...

Sydney Sydney ( ) is the capital city of the state of New South Wales, and the most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Sydney Harbour and extends about towards the Blue Mountain ...

, Australia, and Clinical Associate Professor at the Sydney Medical School - Northern,

University of Sydney The University of Sydney (USYD), also known as Sydney University, or informally Sydney Uni, is a public research university located in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and is one of the country's si ...

. Van Nunen, a specialist in allergies, is widely recognized for her work in 2007 identifying tick-induced

mammalian meat allergy Alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), also known as alpha-gal allergy or mammalian meat allergy (MMA), is a type of acquired meat allergy characterized by a delayed onset of symptoms (3–8 hours) after ingesting mammalian meat. The condition results from pa ...

, which has increased in prevalence worldwide since then. In 2007 she was the first immunologist in the world to describe in a published paper the link between ticks and meat allergy. According to van Nunen, Australia has the highest rate of mammalian meat allergy and tick anaphylaxis in the world. In 2018, after four years in development, van Nunen, in collaboration with a pharmaceuticals company and northern Sydney hospital Emergency Department, released a world-first freeze spray designed to be topically applied to ticks that have attached to humans. The spray kills ticks by freezing, rather than by the traditional method of removal using tweezers. Removing ticks by tweezers was found to have a significantly detrimental effect because tweezers squeeze toxins from the tick into the host and thereby significantly increase the allergen injected. A study released last year by van Nunen supports the growing consensus in Australia to kill the tick in situ rather than pull the tick out. In August 2020 van Nunen urged sufferers of

hay fever Allergic rhinitis, of which the seasonal type is called hay fever, is a type of inflammation in the nose that occurs when the immune system overreacts to allergens in the air. Signs and symptoms include a runny or stuffy nose, sneezing, red, i ...

to get tested for

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was COVID-19 pandemic in Hubei, identified in Wuhan, China, in December ...

. In 2021 van Nunen was awarded the

Order of Australia Medal The Order of Australia is an honour that recognises Australian citizens and other persons for outstanding achievement and service. It was established on 14 February 1975 by Elizabeth II, Queen of Australia, on the advice of the Australian Gove ...

for service to medicine, particularly to clinical immunology and allergy.

References

Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Australian immunologists {{Australia-med-bio-stub