ABSTRACT
It is estimated that exposures in the workplace account for around one in ten cases of new or recurrent asthma in adulthood. Many general respiratory physicians may be surprised by the magnitude of this proportion which is derived from meta-analysis of epidemiological studies that have examined, in the main, the distribution of asthma in different occupations.1 Their scepticism probably reflects not only differences in the way that clinicians and epidemiologists understand ‘attribution’ and the geographical variation in all occupational lung diseases, but also the frequency with which an occupational aetiology for asthma is overlooked.2
