Baker's asthma.

Baker’s asthma is one of the most common forms of occupational asthma. The increasing knowledge in exposure–response relations accumulated in recent years is important in the understanding of baker’s asthma. This development has made scientifically based prevention feasible today and baker’s asthma should not be regarded as an inevitable occurrence any more. In 1700 Bernardo Ramazzini described respiratory symptoms among bakers caused by exposure to flour dust. However, there are anecdotal references from antiquity describing how Roman slaves working in bakeries protected themselves by using cloth as a primitive respirator to cover their faces because their breathing suffered from inhaling flour.