Dust Mite

🇺🇸 History in the United States

House dust itself was identified as an allergen in the United States in 1921, when Robert Kern reported that asthmatic patients reacted on skin testing to extracts of dust from their own homes, and Cooke confirmed in 1922 that dust extracts gave positive reactions in a large share of allergic patients; for the next four decades 'house dust extract' was a staple of American allergy practice with its active ingredient unknown. In 1961, the mite Dermatophagoides farinae — now called the American house dust mite — was formally described by Hughes from US flour samples. The decisive breakthrough came in 1967 when Voorhorst, Spieksma, and colleagues in the Netherlands demonstrated that Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus and its products were identical to the long-mysterious house-dust allergen, a finding published in the Journal of Allergy and quickly confirmed in Japan and the United States, where D. farinae proved to be the dominant species in many American homes. In 1980, Chapman and Platts-Mills purified the major mite allergen Der p 1, and Platts-Mills' group at the University of Virginia went on to define exposure thresholds for sensitization and asthma and to lead US avoidance trials in the 1980s-1990s. NHANES III (1988-1994) found dust mite the single most common positive skin test in the US population at 27.5%, and inner-city and national asthma studies established mite allergen as a major driver of American childhood asthma. Standardized mite extracts were licensed in the US in the 1980s, and FDA-approved dust-mite sublingual immunotherapy tablets followed in 2017.