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".

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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.

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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/