My research concerns improved diagnostics and prevention of occupational and environmental skin diseases, particularly contact dermatitis. Everyone is exposed daily to potentially hazardous factors representing microorganisms, physical factors and chemicals.

A large number of chemical substances and products are constantly introduced occupationally and non-occupationally. Some of these are contact sensitizers. To enable epicutaneous testing our research has resulted in the use of buffers, ultrasonic bath extracts and thin layer chromatograms. The latter technique has been developed in Malmö and is a combined chemical and biological investigation. It has been a great success and for example facilitated the isolation and identification of dimethyl fumarate, an anti-mould agent in furniture and shoes which caused a  severe contact dermatitis in thousands of European citizens a few years ago.  Our finding resulted rapidly in a ban by the EU.

Test methodology, metals, plastics, and dyes are major research areas. The metal research concerns aluminium, palladium, chromium and gold. The gold project is focusing on possible health effects from the systemic release of gold from dental gold in gold-hypersensitive individuals. Polyurethane is the plastics studied. The formation of sensitizing oxidation products in permanent hair dyes and how to protect the hands from the sensitizing hair dyes are parts of the dye project.