Inaugural lecture from farm to fork - a fishy story of allergy and asthma

摘要

This statement by Plato, the Greek philosopher, forms the basis of many a scholarly research endeavour trying to understand the current human experience. Join me on a journey of discovery through the recollection of some aspects of my research over the past decade in unravelling the first case report of seafood allergy in 1937 reported by the Norwegian bacteriologist Arent de Besche of a fisherman who developed allergic symptoms and asthma when handling codfish.De Besche reported:' for this reason patients who suffer from fish asthma will rarely discover for themselves the connection between fish and their malady, and as it seldom occurs to their medical advisors, the patients continue to ... suffer from asthma throughout their lives, whereas an investigation which revealed the real cause of the disease would have relieved them of it...' (Arent de Besche, On Asthma bronchiale in Man provoked by various Kind of Animals, Acta Medica Scandinavica, Vol XCII, Fascl-lll, 1937).