African dust and asthma in the Caribbean: medical and statistical perspectives

摘要

A recent paper by Prospero et al. (2008) reported on a 2-year retrospective study of daily paediatric asthma admissions (DPAA) to the main public hospital in Barbados in relation to daily concentrations of dust measured in off-shore trade winds. Specifically, they looked for large increases in DPAA in relation to the daily dust concentrations and could find no obvious relationship. They concluded that “desert-dust-related asthma does not appear to be a dominating factor in the Caribbean.”