Dr. Scott Commins
speaker
131 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 16 Jul
Dr. Scott Commins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Thanks for having me.
Well, they're often the classic symptoms that bring people into an allergist's office.
So itching, swelling, hives, and then frequently there's accompanying gastrointestinal distress.
terrible abdominal cramping and pain, often nausea, vomiting, diarrhea.
You can even have progression from there where people will feel short of breath or have difficulty maintaining their blood pressure, the things that we think about as anaphylaxis.
Well, they're allergic to a sugar.
So alpha-gal is a carbohydrate, and the allergic antibody recognizes alpha-gal, which is present in the meat and tissues of all non-human mammals.
Well, the ticks, it turns out, seem to have the sugar.
And so when they bite a human,
Their tick saliva and factors in the tick spit seem to cause the human immune system to create this allergic response.
And in some ways, alpha-gal is just sort of an innocent bystander.
And if it weren't in hot dogs, hamburgers, et cetera, we probably would never even know about this allergy.
But the distribution of alpha-gal
in the foods that we eat and the medications that we take create that issue.
Yeah, that's a great question.
And there's probably a nuanced answer, only some of which we really know about.
But one portion of that is the route of administration.
So oral, like you're eating your hot dog or hamburger, that seems to be associated with tolerance.
So very unlikely to develop an allergic response just by consuming the food, particularly when it's been consumed for decades.
The skin, however, is a fantastic way to make an allergic response.
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