Published today: Why it is wrong to promote alpha‐gal syndrome: a response to Crutchfield and Hereth
To the provocatively brilliant super villain article "Beneficial Bloodsucking" by Crutchfield & Hereth, published in the journal Bioethics in 2025, we somehow managed to get a lengthy response published. It is titled "Why It Is Wrong to Promote Alpha-Gal Syndrome: A Response to Crutchfield and Hereth", also published in Bioethics.
Unfortunately, we were not able to have it published open access - but ask and ye shall be given. (Or try this link.)
Published 24 March 2026
Accepted 4 March 2026
Side note: The article has a "Supplementary Material" file, which is in this case called "Supporting Information S1".
Also see Rainer Ebert's post "Why making people allergic to meat isn’t the solution".
--------
Update 30 May 2026:
Someone from a website called Snopes (USA) wrote me an email asking for the full text. They then "printed" (published online) my comment that I had totally informally added in my reply email.
"Props", for not misquoting me. That is exactly what I did write and meant:
"I think some people have misinterpreted their original "Beneficial Bloodsucking" article as a realistic plan, when it was more (I think) of a theoretical scenario to highlight the extreme cruelty that animals are treated with in the meat industry (farms, transport, slaughterhouses)."
An online search suggests that Snopes is one of the oldest and best-known online fact-checking websites in the USA, known for investigating and debunking misinformation.
Some other mentions of our response paper are listed here.
--------
15 June 2026:
--------
24 June 2026:
We received an email from a life scientist with expertise in DNA assembly who pointed out several other feasibility problems with the "alpha-gal plan" (that was really, I think, just a theoretical proposal) by Crutchfield and Hereth.
The "plan" also lacks feasibility because alpha-gal syndrome (allergy) could also be combatted at a national or global level by ...
- ... genetically altering farmed mammals so that their flesh would not trigger the allergy symptoms anymore.
- ... by using bacterial alpha-galactosidase (enzyme) to pre-treat meat and milk prior to entry into the food supply ... which again could prevent the triggering of the symptoms.
Reference:
Rainer Ebert, Christian Koeder: Why It Is Wrong to Promote Alpha-Gal Syndrome: A Response to Crutchfield and Hereth. Bioethics. 2026 Mar 24. doi: 10.1111/bioe.70101. Online ahead of print. https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.70101, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41874369/
Update 24 June 2026:
The article has now been published in an issue: R. Ebert and C. Koeder, “Why It Is Wrong to Promote Alpha-Gal Syndrome: A Response to Crutchfield and Hereth,” Bioethics 40 (2026): 638-645, https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.70101.
