ALI patients surviving hospitalization display significant levels of eosinophil degranulation (i.e., extracellular matrix deposition of EPX) compared with non-surviving patients Assessments of lung sections following EPX-mAb immunohistochemistry revealed that ALI patients displayed significant and varying levels of degranulation that were quantifiable. This degranulation was often observed in these patients in the absence of identifiable intact eosinophils. The photomicrographs of Figure 3 are representative of the stratified levels of increasing degranulation observed in ALI patients from no evidence of degranulation (Level 0) in a given high powered field to >50% of the field evidencing eosinophil degranulation (Level 2b). Similar to the higher levels of eosinophil infiltration observed in the collective group of ALI patients, the collective group also evidenced a >2-fold increase in the level of eosinophil degranulation compared to control subjects (2.20 ± 0.15/hpf vs. 1.02 ± 0.38/hpf, respectively). More importantly, quantitative assessments of degranulation (i.e., mean numerical score ±SEM) based on EPX-mAb immunohistochemistry (Table 3 and Figure 4 ) revealed that ALI patients surviving their hospitalization also displayed significantly higher levels of degranulation compared to non-surviving patients (2.62 ± 0.18/hpf vs. 1.58 ± 0.10/hpf, respectively).