Aerial Application of Mancozeb and Urinary Ethylene Thiourea (ETU) Concentrations among Pregnant Women in Costa Rica: The Infants’ Environmental Health Study (ISA)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Mancozeb and its main metabolite ethylene thiourea (ETU) may alter thyroid function; thyroid hormones are essential for fetal brain development. In Costa Rica, mancozeb is aerially sprayed at large-scale banana plantations on a weekly basis.Objectives: Our goals were to evaluate urinary ETU concentrations in pregnant women living near large-scale banana plantations, compare their estimated daily intake (EDI) with established reference doses (RfDs), and identify factors that predict their urinary ETU concentrations.Methods: We enrolled 451 pregnant women from Matina County, Costa Rica, which has large-scale banana production. We visited 445 women up to three times during pregnancy to obtain urine samples (n = 872) and information on factors that possibly influence exposure. We determined urinary ETU concentrations using liquid chromatography mass spectrometry.Results: Pregnant women’s median urinary ETU concentrations were more than five times higher than those reported for other general populations. Seventy-two percent of the women had EDIs above the RfD. Women who lived closest (1st quartile, < 48 m) to banana plantations on average had a 45% (95% CI: 23, 72%) higher urinary ETU compared with women who lived farthest away (4th quartile, ≥ 565 m). Compared with the other women, ETU was also higher in women who washed agricultural work clothes on the day before sampling (11%; 95% CI: 4.9, 17%), women who worked in agriculture during pregnancy (19%; 95% CI: 9.3, 29%), and immigrant women (6.2%; 95% CI: 1.0, 13%).Conclusions: The pregnant women’s urinary ETU concentrations are of concern, and the principal source of exposure is likely to be aerial spraying of mancozeb. The factors predicting ETU provide insight into possibilities for exposure reduction.Citation: van Wendel de Joode B, Mora AM, Córdoba L, Cano JC, Quesada R, Faniband M, Wesseling C, Ruepert C, Öberg M, Eskenazi B, Mergler D, Lindh CH. 2014. Aerial application of mancozeb and urinary ethylene thiourea (ETU) concentrations among pregnant women in Costa Rica: The Infants’ Environmental Health Study (ISA). Environ Health Perspect 122:1321–1328; http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.1307679
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".