ABSTRACT
Acknowledgments.........................................................................................................................780
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suspected for many years. Immunosuppression, hypersensitivity, or autoimmunity may occur in at least some individuals in response to some drugs. Comparison of the immunotoxic effects of drugs in humans and in experimental animals offers a unique opportunity that is not available for most other classes of immunotoxicants to validate animal models. The dosage and duration of exposure of persons to drugs can usually be ascertained more easily and more reliably than exposure to other classes of immunotoxicants. Thus, it should be possible (with appropriate scaling to account for differences in body surface area and /or metabolic rate) to compare the effects of particular dosages of drugs on particular immunological parameters in humans and in experimental animals. There are several examples in this section of drugs that produce similar immunotoxic effects in humans and in experimental animals, and quan titative (dose-response) comparisons would be of interest in these cases; however, it should be emphasized that numerous studies in the immunotoxicology literature demonstrate that the immunotoxic effects of a particular agent are often remarkably species-or even strainspecific. Thus, reports of effects in only one species or case reports of effects in just a few persons may not represent typical effects for other species or for most persons.
