The Environmental Threat to the Skin

Abstract

The editors of this textbook have attempted to gather together a large amount of information on various environmental skin hazards in one volume of 66 chapters written by more than 100 authors. In the list of contributors, we encounter dermatologists, toxicologists, internists, environmental scientists, pharmacologists, oncologists, and microbiologists. For the most part, the contents are based on a conference held in Cardiff, Wales, in April 1991. The merits and weaknesses of this book can be easily derived from these basic facts. On the positive side, there is the broad variety of subjects covered and the cross-disciplinary approach to particular topics, such as the assessment and quantification of skin hazards induced by UV radiation or chemicals as well as the standardized article format of the chapters, which makes the book more pleasant to read than the average congress report. On the other side, an inevitable shortcoming is the lack of unity