AI Summary
5 min readReturn of Alpha Gal
Amy Pearl loved meat. She had a Peter Luger credit card. She ate porterhouse steaks, hot dogs with a snap, and grilled leg of lamb with foraged ramps. Then one night after a beautiful spring dinner, she felt weird—anxious, lightheaded, stomach cramps, a sense of impending doom. She thought a snail had poisoned her. A few weeks later, she ate a cheeseburger while watching Goodbye, Mr. Chips and ended up with hives spreading across her stomach, unable to lie down without feeling like she would faint. She Googled "sudden meat allergy" and found an article about a Florida man. Her doctor told her there was no such thing.
The allergy that wasn't supposed to exist
Thomas Platts-Mills, an allergist at the University of Virginia, had been hearing stories like Amy's for years. Patients would come in convinced they had suddenly become allergic to red meat after decades of eating it without issue. He didn't believe them. "Adults don't become allergic to something they've eaten for forty years out of the blue," he said, "and certainly not red meat." He thought they might have some ghastly disease.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (02:59) **Amy Pearl’s Meat Love Story** - Amy describes her lifelong love of red meat, from childhood birthday dinners to Peter Luger porterhouses.
- 2 (04:38) **The First Terrifying Reaction** - After a dinner of grilled lamb and foraged ramps, Amy wakes up with a feeling of impending doom, stomach cramps, and a strange face.
- 3 (06:25) **The Second Reaction and a Google Search** - A week later, after eating a cheeseburger, Amy develops hives and a fainting sensation, leading her to search “sudden meat allergy.”
- 4 (08:16) **The Doctor’s Skepticism** - Amy’s doctor dismisses the idea of a meat allergy, echoing the medical orthodoxy that adults don’t suddenly become allergic to foods they’ve eaten for decades.
- 5 (10:31) **The Cancer Drug Clue** - The mystery cracks when a new cancer drug, Cetuximab, causes severe anaphylactic shock in some patients.
- 6 (12:38) **The Self-Test Gone Wrong** - Skeptical of the allergy, Amy decides to test herself by eating a porterhouse steak at her mother’s house.
- 7 (16:31) **Connecting the Dots to Ticks** - Dr. Platts-Mills notices that the Cetuximab reactions are clustered in a specific geographic area that matches the range of Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
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Show Notes
Several years ago, in 2016, we told a story about Amy Pearl. For as long as she could remember, Amy loved meat in all its glorious cuts and marbled flavors. And then one day, for seemingly no reason, her body wouldn’t tolerate it. No steaks. No brisket. No weenies. It made no sense: why couldn’t she eat something that she had routinely enjoyed for decades?
It turned out Amy was not alone. And the answer to her mysterious allergy involved maps, a dancing lone star tick, and a very particular sugar called Alpha Gal.
In this update, we discover that our troubles with Alpha Gal go way beyond food. We go to NYU Langone Health hospital to see the second ever transplant of a kidney from a pig into a human, talk to some people at Revivicor, the company that bred the pig in question, and go back to Amy to find out what she thinks about this brave new world.
The original episode was reported by Latif Nasser, and produced by Annie McEwen and Matt Kielty. Sound design and scoring from Dylan Keefe, Annie McEwen, and Matt Kielty. Mix by Dylan Keefe with Arianne Wack.
The update was reported and produced by Sarah Qari. It was sound designed, scored, and mixed by Jeremy Bloom.
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