From 1951 to 1967, the secretariat http://www.selleckchem.com/products/MG132.html and the archives of the IAA obviously remained in the hands of individual ��amateurs,�� particularly the presidents and secretaries-general, who did not institute central archives but kept IAA papers within their personal documents. Some may have saved such personal papers but in various places, and they have not been accessible to me, the more as most of the protagonists have died. My personal acquaintance with the IAA starts with the V International Congress of Allergology and Clinical Immunology in Madrid in 1964, which I attended at the age of 36. In contrast with the beliefs of some who have seen me associated so long with the IAACI, I have not been a ��founder member��: for this, I should be by now almost 100!! Since 1970, I have kept many documents and meeting reports from various IAA committees and congresses.

It is on that basis that these historical reminiscences have been written. The original documents are by now collected in central archives at the WAO secretariat located in the United States in Milwaukee. The history of allergy as a medical and scientific discipline has been the subject of numerous reviews and books (Walter and Holtzman,1 Merikas et al,2 and Bungy et al3). If the real birth of allergy as medically recognized phenomena and diseases dates from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century (eg, Blackley: allergy to pollen, 1873; Portier and Richet: discovery of anaphylaxis, 1902; von Pirquet: definition of allergy, 1905; Noon: immunotherapy, 1911), few physicians devoted themselves fully to research, diagnosis, and treatment of allergic diseases until World War II.

Accordingly, few national or regional groups in allergology were founded before 1945. By 1950, however, particularly under the impulse of active Cilengitide North Americans and British, French, and South American physicians and biologists devoted to allergology, the climate seemed ripe for the creation not only of national societies but also of a professional society at the international level. This became the original IAA, officially founded in Z��rich in 1951. This is usually given as the official birth date of the \IAA, but an editorial by Fred W. Wittich, the first president of the IAA, in the first issue of the International Archives of Allergy and Applied Immunology in 1950, revealed that the IAA was actually first incorporated in the United States in August 1945.4 This current review is limited to the first 50 years of the association. This is almost a natural partition.