Soldiers and Oil Well Smoke

have to be considered. The first, which has been developed in the preceding section, is that passive smoking could act to disclose an asthmatic state that was so far asymptomatic. The second issue lies in the natural history of asthma. Following Martinez et al.’s publications, it has become obvious that transient wheezing could occur in non-atopic infants exposed to passive smoking. Because the relationships between passive smoking and asthma are mostly demonstrated in infants and young children, and have a tendency to weaken with increasing age, one cannot discard the hypothesis that passive smoking is responsible for transient wheezing, not for an asthmatic disease. In this field also, prospective long-term studies are clearly needed. In conclusion, the relevance of such risk factors as allergen exposure, air pollution and passive smoking is far from being clear. Because the implication of such risk factors has enormous social consequences, such a clarification is strongly needed. More carefully designed epidemiological investigations should obviously be performed.