Southampton Professors win top prize at BMA Awards

University of Southampton Professors Stephen Holgate and Martin Church won top prize at this year’s prestigious British Medical Association (BMA) Medical Book Competition in London last night.

Their book Allergy, 3rd edition (Mosby Elsevier 2006) was awarded BMA Medical Book of the Year and also came first in the Respiratory Medicine category.

The book, co-authored with Professor Lawrence Lichtenstein from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA, was praised by its reviewer as offering “a wealth of detailed information on the diagnosis, treatment, and management of allergic diseases—from asthma to urticaria.”

Professor Martin Church, co-author of Allergy, said: "All the authors are thrilled by the recognition that this BMA Award gives us for our book. The current book is the third edition and contains more clinical information than previous editions. We have always endeavoured to use illustrations to replace rather than repeat information in the text and this latest update contains a CD Rom with slides suitable for presentation.

"We are indebted to our publishers who have been brilliant in helping us achieve our objective of producing a really accessible book at a time when allergic disease has reached epidemic proportions."

The BMA Medical Book competition has been held annually since 1994 by the BMA’s Board of Science and is administered by the BMA Library. It aims to encourage and reward excellence in medical publishing and patient information.

A record 632 titles competed for 20 top awards across a variety of categories in this year’s competition.