Environmental contaminants and children's health: Cause for concern, time for action
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present paper provides an outline of the developmental and behavioural characteristics that make children, especially the fetus and young child, more vulnerable to contaminants than adults. The major categories of contaminants are briefly described. The evidence for their possible effects on neurobehavioural development; immune, endocrine and respiratory systems; childhood cancer based on research studies with animals; children exposed to catastrophic 'accidents' involving overdose exposures; and pregnant women and children from communities with high 'background' levels of contamination who participated in studies is reviewed. While the data are worrisome, especially for children living in northern and certain urban communities, much remains to be learned about possible subtle effects and the potential for long term effects of the current background contamination experienced by the majority of Canadian children before its significance to their health can be fully evaluated. The present regulatory processes, which are based on risk assessment, are so cumbersome and costly that the great majority of chemicals in use have not been fully evaluated, and the ingenuity of new chemical production continually exceeds the capacity to test the new chemicals. Moreover, despite past insistence on scientific proof of adverse effects and safety, unanticipated effects have occurred that will threaten the sustainability of human life unless more effective control measures are taken to limit the release of toxic substances and persistent chemicals into the environment. Therefore, the shortcomings of risk assessment are discussed, and the precautionary principle, which is used in some countries and is proposed for use internationally as an alternative measure that may offer improved control for the future, is outlined. Finally, opportunities for physician action are suggested.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 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".