The paper by Murayama et al¹ contains the unwary statement that their study may have been the first to demonstrate the suppressive effects of Aspergillus products on antifungal host defences by both human alveolar macrophages and PMNs. A search for Aspergillus in the eThorax website would have saved both them and your referees from accepting this. In a series of papers published in the 1980s Maura Robertson and I showed this in animal and human cells, demonstrated the paradoxical effect of complement and, perhaps importantly, showed that the substance produced by the spores had similar effects on soil protozoa, thus explaining the biological paradox as to why an organism that gains nothing from colonising animal lungs should have developed such exquisite antiphagocytic properties. Some of this work was summarised in our paper pupblished in the Lancet in 1989.² These effects are discussed in at least one well known textbook of . . . [Full text of this article]