I have only worked in smaller animals like mice, guinea pig and rabbit for skin testing. The dose is determined on 1 mg/ml. Although the dose is an educational guess, I have not had problem with the dose I used.

I do not read the adequate dose of histamine is reported on cattle for skin testing. However, it is safe to start with 1mg/ml concentration of histamine. You may advance the dose starting from 1mg/ml steadily up to 5 mg/ml if you do not see a visible reaction at the lower dose after 15 min.

You must be careful how to apply skin test as it matters how deeply you inject histamine with needle. Subcutaneous injection should be the route to choose, and it would make the swelling size easier to measure. Also, make sure that you shave the hair off on the area where the skin test will be done, in order for you to mark the size of redness and wheal formation. Hope it helps.

Shih-Wen Huang,MD

 thank you Shih-Wen Huang. what product of histamine did you use? i mean to say with whihc barnd name did you buy histmine? I am going to use histamine dihydrochloride of sigma. did you use histamine with glycerol or aquous  solution?

I have used histamine control for skin testing from different companies. Ordinarily, in the solution, company added glycerin as a stabilizer. Some companies added a small amount of sodium chloride or sodium bicarbonate as well. Those are considered inert chemicals that have little chance of causing skin reaction by themselves.

In performing any skin testing, you must add a negative control to contrast the reaction to  positive control to make sure an adverse reaction to other chemical(s) would not interfere the reading of histamine reaction. It would be wise to choose a negative control with saline solution that has glycerol in it, so that should there be adverse reaction to glycerol occurs (the chance is very slim). you could identify it on site,

Wish you the best.

Shih-Wen Huang

thank you very much Shih-Wen Huang.