Latex allergies from right out of thin air?

An estimated 17 million people in the United States suffer allergic reactions to products derived from the milky sap of the rubber tree. Because this latex allergy develops only after some sensitizing contact with rubber, health care workers were one the first populations recognized to face a major risk. Surgical gloves, elastic bandages, blood-pressure cuffs, catheters, and adhesive tape are among the growing list of latex-based medical supplies.

Many consumer products also rely on latex -- notably, kitchen gloves and condoms. Yet some people develop latex allergy with seemingly no significant exposure to such products. Why?

A team of California researchers offers one novel suggestion: air pollution.

At Experimental Biology '95 in Atlanta last week, the team presented data showing not only that latex occurs in urban air and roadside dust, but also that it includes components recognized by human and rabbit antibodies to latex.

Though latex concentrations collected by air filters in Long Beach and Los Angeles "were very small" -- 0.2 microgram or less per cubic meter of air -- "we were surprised to find any," points out M. Michael Glovsky, medical director of Huntington Memorial Hospital's asthma and allergy center in Pasadena.

Moreover, he explains, because people can inhale these fine, airborne particles deeply into their lungs' small airways, "they may accumulate. So, theoretically, one could become sensitized" (see related story, p.254).

Saline extracts of ground-up pieces of car and truck tires and of rubber gloves elicited the same type of antibody responses.

In the January Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, P. Brock Williams and his colleagues at the Allergy Respiratory Institute of Colorado in Denver identified worn-tire particles -- again recognized by latex antibodies -- as the apparent source of most latex in the outdoor air they analyzed.

It should have been obvious that tires would shed latex into the

environment during normal wear, notes allergist Timothy J. Sullivan of Emory University in Atlanta. Yet he says many researchers initially had a hard time accepting the Denver group's findings.

But the new data from Glovsky's team "add substantially to proving that latex is out there and that it potentially can cause allergic reactions," he believes.

Moreover, he notes, such findings may partially explain a previously perplexing observation by his group: that about 6 percent of the people entering the Emory Clinic with allergic rhinitis (runny nose) and asthma possess antibodies to latex.