Apostolos Bossios
Dpt of Internal Medicine/Respiratory Medicine and Allergology,
Sahlgrenska Academy Göteborg University
Guldhedsgatan 10A SE-41345 Gothenburg Sweden
Tel: +46 31-3423336
Fax: +46 31-413290
e-mail: apostolos.bossios@gu.se

Venue: XXVII EAACI Congress, Barcelona, Spain

The theme of the XXVII EAACI Congress is “Clinical Features of Allergy: From Pediatric to Geriatric”: How do you approach this theme?
As you know probably, allergy is a potentially chronic disease, so it’s very important that allergic patients who have it from their birth to maintain a good medical attitude throughout their life. There are patients from all ages, from birth to teenagers, young and not so young… adults. Even more , if you consider that now elderly people are getting more and more I believe that this year’s theme is really an excellent choice, because we must learn how to properly treat these people from their infancy to their elderly life.

According to hard facts, over 100 million in Europe suffer from allergies, which indicates that allergy as a disease keeps rising on a steadily increasing rate: Do you think that people are well informed of the problem?

Not really, although as you said, it is a problem that keeps rising; I do not think people really understand what the problem is about. And here lies our task:

because at the end of the day, what you are doing research for? To help our patients. So it’s not enough just to talk about it in our meeting, but we have to circulate information, we must go out to the people, and actively involve them. So, I think that the new task that EAACI is taking, to make a public website is and inform a lot of people, it’s a excellent task and we must go for that.

Do you think that the climate changes affect chronical allergies?

That’s really a tough question to answer. I do not know really, of course there is a on going change in our climate, and in parallel allergies increase as well. We all as clinicians have experience a worsening in our patients status during “difficult” days in the cities and not only. We know for a fact that some aspects of the pollution, like ozon, are getting worse. So we think that there are elements from the climate that can have a direct effect on the allergy increase. However, it’s not easy to give a yes or no answer, I think. There are yet, more to learn there.

How do you see the future of allergy as disease, as discipline?

I am very optimistic about that. Despite the fact that more people are getting more and more allergic and allergies increase worldwide, more physicians and researchers are involved on their treatment. Colleagues that are becoming better educated and better prepared on how to deal with the problem. So especially as they deal with the problem from different views and scientific background make me very optimistic that in the near (?) future allergy will stop to be a so important health problem.

Have you got any other themes in mind for the future EAACI Congresses?
I think that the Local Organising Committee has done an excellent job, this is an excellent congress. Every time I have been to an EAACI Congress, since 2000in Lisboa, I must say that “this is better than the last one”. More people are attending, more basic science is involved, which is very important, more clinical research, so in all, it’s getting better and better. And I really have faith in them, I think that this is the way to go, to emerge more basic research with clinical science. I believe this the route we must follow.