International Year of Planet Earth 2. Earth and Health — Building a Safer Canadian Environment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article reviews the current state of Earth and Health research in Canada, in commemoration of International Year of Planet Earth. Canadian geoscientists play a pivotal role in identifying sources and pathways of exposure to geochemical substances that may be beneficial or detrimental to human health. Application of geoscience techniques and expertise contributes to understanding the sources and pathways of natural versus anthropogenic contaminants; bioaccumulation and biomagnification of contaminants in remote settings; and regional variability in background levels of elements and their compounds in the environment. Internationally, the relationship of earth sciences to human health has become so important that it has given rise to a new field of study termed ‘Medical Geology’. Within Canada, there are vivid examples of the impact of geological materials and processes on human health. Mineralogists, geochemists and toxicologists have started collaborating to quantify proportions of metals in soil and dirt, household dust, and playground substrates that are soluble and potentially available for absorption in the body. Other current issues include the new radon guidelines; distribution patterns of mercury in Canadian Shield lakes and reservoirs; geological sources of arsenic and fluoride in groundwater; selenium in Cretaceous sediments; exposures to airborne particles, some of which have natural sources such as windblown dust, forest-fire debris, and volcanic ash; and urban geochemistry with focus on childhood exposures to lead. Geoscience research into sources and pathways of metals and other geochemical hazards improves the accuracy and reliability of human health risk assessments that underlie risk management policies and decision-making. SOMMAIRE A l'occasion de l'Annee internationale de la planete Terre, le present article passe en revue l'etat de la recherche en sciences de la Terre et en sciences de la sante au Canada. Les geoscientifiques canadiens ont un role charniere dans la determination des sources et des voies d'exposition aux substances geochimiques pouvant etre benefiques ou nocives pour la sante. L'application des techniques et des connaissances geoscientifiques aident a determiner les sources et les voies d'exposition naturelles et anthropogeniques, les mecanismes de bioaccumulation et de bioamplification sur des sites eloignes ainsi que la variabilite regionale des concentrations de fond des elements et de leurs composes dans l'environnement. Sur le plan international, la relation entre les sciences de la Terre et les sciences de la sante est d'une importance telle qu'un nouveau champ de recherche est ne, la geologie medicale. Au Canada, on peut voir des exemples frappants de l'impact qu'ont des materiaux et des mecanismes geologiques sur la sante humaine. Les mineralogistes, les geochimistes et les toxicologistes ont commence a mettre en commun leurs efforts dans le but de quantifier les proportions de metaux solubles presents dans le sol et la salete, les poussieres domestiques et les sols de terrains de jeux, pouvant etre absorbes a travers l'epiderme. Parmi d'autres questions d'importance, il y a les nouvelles lignes directrices sur le radon; les profils de distribution du mercure dans les lacs et les reservoirs du Bouclier canadien; les sources d'arsenic et de fluorure dans les eaux souterraines; le selenium dans les sediments cretaces; les types d'exposition aux particules en suspension dans l'air, dont certaines sont d'origine naturelle comme les poussieres eoliennes, les cendres de feux de foret ou des eruptions volcaniques, et; la geochimie urbaine, avec un accent sur l'exposition au plomb des enfants. La recherche geoscientifique sur les sources les voies d'exposition des metaux et autres risques geochimiques permet d'ameliorer la precision et la fiabilite des evaluations du risque pour la sante humaine qui sous-tendent les politiques et la prise de decision en matiere de gestion de risque.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".