Abstract
A clinical guide to occupational and environmental lung diseases; better titled a guide to occupational or environmental lung diseases, as few chapters integrate the two (the exceptions being chapters on COPD in non-smokers and global impacts). Many chapters are written well away from the coal face, with a lack of advice on how to differentiate whether an individual patient has an occupational, environmental or other cause of disease. There is almost nothing on the dose of an agent required to produce a disease, or how this can be estimated. It is a very traditional book, with chapters on individual diseases rather than on clinical presentations. This results in some chapters being of sufficient detail for a reference text (hard metal, beryllium and a particularly good chapter on inhalation injuries with an emphasis on emergency management). These are the most successful, together with a masterly treatise on historical aspects by Paul Blanc. Despite the introduction, it is unclear who the book was actually written for. Practicing respiratory physicians would probably be happier to rely on the occupational sections of more comprehensive books on lung diseases. It has a very North American flavour, written with a little help from Israel (global impacts), the United Kingdom (COPD), Japan (hard metal) and China (lung cancer). The chapter on disability assessment gives no advice at all on how to assess disability (something that would be particularly useful for many respiratory physicians), it completely ignores the role of occupation physicians in assessing the ability of a worker to do a particular job and concentrates on the vagaries of US compensation schemes. I did however learn why umbrellas are usually black.
Something must be said about the books production. There are quite a few illustrations in colour, most of which would not warrant any illustration at all (covers of books, text boxes with a different colour on each line, etc.). The money would have been much better spent on better quality reproduction of the radiographs. There are many, particularly in an otherwise good radiology chapter, where the reproduction is of such poor quality that the abnormalities cannot be seen.