Contact urticaria to commercial fish in atopic persons

The frequency of contact urticaria provoked by certain fish prepared in the Danish fish industry was examined in 14 persons with atopia. In 71.4% of the test persons we found positive confirmation in a 20-minute scratch patch test to one or more fish species. All occluded patch tests were negative, while 33.9% of the scratch patch tests were positive. It was impossible to make a correlation between positive scratch patch tests and atopic allergen/total IgE. The investigation emphasizes that atopics have a higher frequency of contact urticaria to fish than have non-atopics.