Determinants of airborne rat and mouse urinary allergen exposure

Detection of mouse and rat urinary aeroallergens with an improved ELISA

“…[9][10][11] This was also the case in the present study. It was also observed that the number of cages worked with, different working habits, and technical interventions (such as local exhaust ventilation systems) explained the variation.…”

“…Generally, the highest exposure to Mus m 1 or Rat n 1 has been found to occur during cage cleaning, changing animals from dirty to clean cages, feeding, and animal handling. 9,10,15,16,19,[31][32][33] However, within the same task or area category in this study, the allergen concentrations within a task or area varied. This has been observed also in other studies, eg, the measured Mus m 1 concentrations differed by greater than 4000-fold during emptying dirty cages.…”

“…Besides this study, the IOM-sampler has also been used for collection of inhalable dust for the measurement of airborne animal allergens. 9,10,[14][15][16]18,21,[25][26][27] Likewise, the extraction method used in this study has been shown to be efficient and to produce stable extracts. 24 Different assay types produce large differences in the absolute allergen concentration as was shown recently.…”

“…This has been observed also in other studies, eg, the measured Mus m 1 concentrations differed by greater than 4000-fold during emptying dirty cages. 9,10 Because the number of handled animals (cages) during each task sampling differs and thus affects the allergen levels, it remains difficult to establish reference levels for good hygiene in various tasks. Thus, the mere description of a work task might not give reliable indication of the exposure level and thus should not be used as a surrogate for exposure assessment, and the need to measure allergen concentrations prevails.…”

Monitoring of occupational and environmental aeroallergens – EAACI Position Paper

“…In work environments, exposure levels for the same environment or individual may vary across orders of magnitude within a few hours, as illustrated by job-task-related measurements (14)(15)(16)(17). Such temporal and spatial variability is considerably larger than sampling (typically 10-50%) and analytical errors (<15-20%) for most allergen immunoassays.…”