Mineralogical and geochemical analyses of the healing elements in clayey soils from Isinuka traditional spa in Port St Johns, South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Clay from Isinuka Springs in the Port St Johns area of the Eastern Cape of South Africa is used by local people for cosmetic purposes and for the treatment of an array of ailments and diseases. This study relates the acclaimed cosmetic and therapeutic properties of the clay to its mineralogical and geochemical composition and properties. The clay samples were dried and their pH measured. They were all found to be alkaline. Particle size distribution experiments were carried out. X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analyses detected various amounts of As, Co, Cr, Cu, Ni, Pb, Sr, U and Zn in the samples. The highest mean concentration of an element recorded was for Sr, with a mean value of 2550 ppm. X-ray diffraction was used to elucidate the mineralogical composition of the samples. Results showed that the clay, though useful for therapeutic and cosmetic purposes, poses a health risk, especially on repeated exposure. The acclaimed dermatological properties of the clays may be ascribed to the presence of S, Cu, Zn, Ti and As in the samples. Microbiological analysis of the samples may shed more light on the possible medicinal properties of the clays.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".