Respiratory Allergies in Industry: A Review of Recent Advances and Current Clinical Practice

摘要

In the last decade significant advances have been made in our understanding of allergy. Many new industrial allergens causing respiratory disease have been discovered. This paper reviews the present understanding of the types of allergy commonly encountered in industry and examines methods of detection, diagnosis and control, necessary within a factory environment. A programme of screening procedures to exclude those most likely to be affected and to discover subjects with acute or chronic disease is discussed.The necessity for detecting long-term trends is considered, and statistical methods of analysing data from screening procedures are outlined.