Occupational asthma in a pharmacist induced by chlorella, a unicellular algae preparation

Abstract

A 44-year-old pharmacist had worked in her present pharmaceutical factory for 2 yr. For over a year and a half, she had been having frequent episodes of rhinitis, cough, phlegm, shortness of breath and wheezing, about once every 2 weeks. Her symptoms occurred both in the day and night, during sleep, and were more frequent during working days and better at weekends. She had no known past personal or family history of atopy or asthma, and had never smoked. She had no problem with asthma in her previous employments in several other pharmaceutical manufacturing firms which manufactured a similar broad range of common generic drugs as in the present company. She observed her asthma developed when she started working at her present place of employment, about a month after the company began production of chlorella tablets, and that her attacks appeared to occur on days when chlorella tablets were in production. Exposure to fine chlorella powder occurred from opening of packets, tipping, weighing and tableting, which was done for a few days once in several weeks. Histamine inhalation challenge test, carried out