This issue of Environmental Health Perspectives Supplements includes papers presented at the Conference on Berylliumrelated Diseases held November 8-10, 1994, at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Beryllium is the lightest of all solid and chemically stable substances and is used in some form in the aerospace, nuclear, telecommunicat...

The MHC is central to the adaptive immune response. The human MHC class II is encoded by three different isotypes, HLA-DR, -DQ, and -DP, each being highly polymorphic. In contrast to HLA-DR, the intracellular assembly and trafficking of HLA-DP molecules have not been studied extensively. However, different HLA-DP variants can be either protective or risk factors for infectious diseases (e.g. he...

Beryllium exposure in the workplace can result in chronic beryllium disease, a granulomatous lung disorder characterized by CD4(+) T cell alveolitis and progressive lung fibrosis. A large number of the CD4(+) T cells recruited to the lung in chronic beryllium disease recognize beryllium in an Ag-specific manner and express Th1-type cytokines following T cell activation. Beryllium-responsive CD4...

The role of pathology in the diagnosis of sarcoidosis is identification of granulomas in tissue specimens and performance of studies to exclude known causes of granulomatous inflammation. The granulomas of sarcoidosis are nonspecific lesions that, by themselves and in the absence of an identifiable etiologic agent, are not diagnostic of sarcoidosis or any other specific disease. Among the disea...

This report is based on 30 deaths from chronic beryllium disease (CBD) in the United Kingdom with details of 19 autopsies. The majority were fluorescent lamp workers and machinists who died from respiratory failure. There were no cases of lung cancer. The survival times ranged from less than 1 to 29 years and was longest in machinists. All of the workers showed interstitial pulmonary fibrosis w...

The blood beryllium lymphocyte proliferation test is used in medical surveillance to identify both beryllium sensitization and chronic beryllium disease. Approximately 50% of individuals with beryllium sensitization have chronic beryllium disease at the time of their initial clinical evaluation; however, the rate of progression from beryllium sensitization to chronic beryllium disease is unknow...

OBJECTIVE The study was designed to investigate whether beryllium exposure was related to illness diagnosed as sarcoidosis. Chronic beryllium disease (CBD) and sarcoidosis are clinically and pathologically indistinguishable, with only the presence of beryllium-specific T-lymphocytes identifying CBD. Testing for such cells is not feasible in community studies of sarcoidosis but a second characte...