For most patients with ALI, eosinophils have not been reported as a prominent histological feature, despite their potential tissue damaging capability [5, 28] and their presence in a number of other well defined pulmonary diseases such as asthma [29] and acute eosinophilic pneumonia [30] . However, among this larger literature there are some studies that have implicated this granulocyte as either a potentially important contributor to disease or, at the least, a diagnostic biomarker of events occurring in ALI patients [21, 27, 31] . Interestingly, these studies suggested a "predictive" and "discriminative" value of eosinophil activity assessments in designing an effective therapy for patients exhibiting clinical features of ALI. Unfortunately, the lack of an observable eosinophil infiltrate at the histological level remains a significant confounding issue, especially for those patients who may have been treated (even briefly) with systemic corticosteroids. In turn, the typical absence of visible eosinophils in most cases of ALI that come to biopsy has limited the further development of hypotheses and experimental studies investigating a role (s) of eosinophils in ALI.