Acute allergic disease in a hospital emergency room: a retrospective evaluation of one year's experience.

Efforts at understanding the patterns and prevalence rates of various causes of anaphylaxis are needed. This report is a first effort to address the issue and review the experiences of one voluntary hospital emergency room, where records from 326 (1.4%) of 23,647 emergency room reports for 1992 were analyzed. These results are compared to other already published results. Further study, on a national basis, is clearly necessary. It was remarkable that only 13/48 (27%) bee sting allergic patients were given self-injectable epinephrine and only 6/48 (12.5%) of these patients were referred to an allergist. Further, none of 165 other patients was referred to an allergist.