WITH the tremendous increase in allergies in recent years, a great many people have become familiar with steroid inhalers for asthma and hay fever.

But the story of how research in Derby prevented these inhalers – now acknowledged worldwide to be the greatest advance in the treatment of asthma and hay fever – from being thrown away as useless is not widely known.

In 1956, a Medical Research Council trial decided steroid tablets were not helpful in the treatment of chronic asthma.

I just could not accept this, because I had found steroids so dramatically effective, but could I prove the council wrong?

Using my old student's microscope, I devised a test which enabled me to distinguish in minutes between allergic asthma with eosinophil cells (which respond to steroids) and chronic bronchitis (which does not).

The results of my trial, the very first to show only the wheezy patients with eosinophil cells in their sputum were helped by steroids, was published in the Lancet in 1958 but attracted no attention from the council or anyone else.

Unfortunately, steroid tablets cause many side-effects when taken for a long time so, during the next 10 years, an allergy clinic and research laboratory were developed in Derby's Green Lane to study allergies.

In 1968, the Midlands Asthma and Allergy Research Association was formed to support allergy research.

Researchers included aerobiologists Julie Corden, Felicity Jackson and Wendy Millington, still working for the association until they retired a few years ago.

In the same year, the very first steroid inhalers were made by 3M in Loughborough for Allen and Hanbury, intending to treat asthma without side-effects by inhaling the steroid drug directly into the bronchial tubes.

These aerosols were given to a hospital in Edinburgh for a clinical trial but were found to be quite ineffective.

By 1969, the makers had decided to stop the trials and throw away the aerosols when they became aware I could select steroid-responsive patients with my test.

They realised that the Edinburgh investigators might have been treating bronchitis, not allergic asthma.

I was asked to give the very first steroid inhalers another chance and, in July 1970, began a trial in Derby, treating only patients with allergy cells in their sputum and giving everyone a peak flow meter to produce hard evidence. From the start, the aerosols were so obviously effective that, within six months, the makers decided to reprieve the aerosols and an extensive programme of research began in Derby and elsewhere.

The dramatic results were announced at a European conference in France in October 1971, published in the British Medical Journal in 1972, and, in 1973, for asthmatic children.

These publications attracted worldwide interest and other trials soon confirmed our results.

Within a few years, aerosol steroid inhalers (Becotide) were being used to treat asthma worldwide, especially as most patients dependent on steroid tablets to control their asthma could be transferred to Becotide instead and all the side-effects would disappear.

Only the most difficult asthmatics need continuous oral steroids today. Since then, many effective inhaled steroid drugs have been developed but Derby research led the way.

The late Sir David Jack, who developed Becotide, the very first inhaled steroid, wrote to me in 2008 stating: "Without your help, the introduction of inhaled steroids for asthma would have been indefinitely delayed."

Inhaled steroids suppress asthma, whatever the cause, and so many patients become dependent on them for life.

In my opinion, to be content with suppression of symptoms and dependence on drugs is a poor standard of medicine.

Ideally, allergies should be investigated so that the cause can be found and avoided but Britain has the most inadequate allergy services in Europe and allergy is very seldom taught in medical schools.

Committees from the House of Commons and the Lords have highlighted this problem but it will be many years before there is an adequate NHS service.

When I retired from the NHS 30 years ago, one might imagine that, having made a seminal breakthrough in diagnosis of allergic asthma – which eventually led to a revolution in the treatment of asthma and allergies, I might hang up my stethoscope.

Far from it. I have never stopped helping and advising allergic patients because I enjoy solving their problems.

It is very satisfying, I never tire of it, I do not feel my age, and I continue in good health.

The doctors who knew of my pioneering work in allergy have all retired and their successors have probably never heard of me or think I am long gone.

But, only last month, I was invited to lecture on my research at Imperial College, London.

I have established a huge website, with lots of clinical pictures, at www.allergies explained.com, to give the public or their medical advisers access to all my research over the past 50 years. I also publish articles on food allergies in www.foodsmatter.com.

I still continue my aerobiology research by capturing and studying, through my microscope, the organic and inorganic pollution in the air.

I continue to invent air-sampling devices in my well-equipped workshop and present my research at the annual meetings of the British Society for Allergy.

My wish would be to find someone who can help me with making videos through my research microscope. I have no special plans for the future but welcome each day as a bonus since open-heart surgery on my 80th birthday.

Today is my 95th birthday and it will be very lonely without Freda, who passed away last June, leaving a huge space which will never be filled.

When my time comes, I trust it will be in my sleep and I will lie beside her in a peaceful wood near Ripley.