Perspectives on research and practice in occupational and environmental health: the case of benzene.

摘要

Readers of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (OEM) are quite familiar with reports that highlight clinical cases or workplace incidents that may represent sentinel events or exposures. There is a storied history of these in the field and there are countless examples of their utility and importance to doctors and researchers. Recently, when I was reviewing the archives of OEM online ((http://oem.bmj.eom/contents-by-date.0. dtl); browsing this archive is an activity I highly recommend to all) I was struck by the considerable evidence of the active evolution of medicine and science. The archive is replete with published descriptions of occupational disease that, in retrospect, offer striking evidence of the incremental advance in the understanding of mechanism, diagnosis and prognosis in a large number of complex medical conditions.