New Disease, Old Story

Like most medical journals, Annals regularly reports new developments in clinical medicine. It is not every day, however, that we report an entirely new disease. The paper by Kern and colleagues in this issue [1] is therefore particularly noteworthy because it describes “flock worker's lung,” a new and unique form of interstitial lung disease so far described only in persons who work in plants that manufacture nylon flocking-velvety textiles that are widely used in automobile upholstery, toys, and the like. Preliminary descriptions of flock worker's lung have appeared elsewhere [2, 3], and a health-hazard evaluation of the plant that employed the patients described by Kern and colleagues is now available [4], but a full report of clinical findings in this disabling disease has not previously been published.

Kern's occupational medicine unit in Providence, Rhode Island, led the investigation that defined flock worker's lung, although the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) was also involved. As the pattern of the disease emerged-most strikingly, an incidence at least 50 times that of interstitial lung disease in the general population-even …