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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Science Friday · How does a tick bite cause a red meat allergy? · 16 Jul 2026 podcast

They're like the head of a pin.

And you can be bitten by hundreds at once because they often...

Or come out of an egg mass so there's thousands of these tiny little ticks that are laid in a very small space and if you brush by the wrong leaf or blade of grass, you can literally end up with hundreds of bites and that also seems to be a bad actor.

We think it has to do with the fat content of the meat or meal being the important part of delivering alpha-gal.

So fat has alpha-gal on it, and it can exist in the science realm as what we call a glycolipid, so a fat molecule that has sugar on it.

It turns out that the absorption of fat takes much longer than proteins or carbohydrates on their own.

That whole process takes several hours.

And patients will often say that the fattier meals bother them more.

If you were to give alpha-gal intravenously, as was occurring with the cancer medicine cetuximab, those reactions happen within minutes.

Well, it is fairly widespread.

So basically the entire East Coast all the way west to around the Rockies because we're starting to see a lot of cases in Oklahoma, Nebraska.

There are cases around the Great Lakes areas as well.

And I mentioned Maine.

So we've extended now from the original sort of southeastern states up the East Coast.

And then there are these hotspots.

Suffolk County, Long Island has a tremendous issue with AGS.

So as you mentioned, Martha's Vineyard seems to be a recent hotspot and is currently receiving a lot of attention because the rates have just gone up exponentially.

No, Zolair is on label because Zolair, as the FDA approved it, is for any IgE-mediated food allergy.

So there's the IgE term again.

But AGS falls in that too, same as peanut, cow's milk, egg, et cetera.

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