Organic and Inorganic Arsenic in Natural Health Products
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Arsenic is present in the environment in both organic and inorganic forms. While organic arsenicals are generally considered to have very low toxicity, the inorganic species is widely recognized as a carcinogen in addition to causing numerous other adverse health effects following acute or chronic exposure [1,2]. The tolerance limit for arsenic as a contaminant in natural health products (NHPs) currently recommended by Health Canada's Natural Health Products Directorate (NHPD) is 0.14 µg/kg body weight/day [3]. However, this limit represents total arsenic and does not distinguish between organic and inorganic arsenical compounds. Consequently, this current limit may be unnecessarily restrictive for the NHP industry as certain products may contain high levels of relatively non-toxic organic arsenic forms, but only minimal amounts of the toxic inorganic arsenic. NHPD investigated this issue in order to determine whether there is substantial scientific evidence to support separate limits for inorganic and organic derivatives of arsenic, and whether suitable analytical methodology exists to distinguish between these forms in finished NHPs. The review involved assessing arsenic toxicity, analytical methodology, and exposure scenarios for natural ingredients used in dietary supplements (e.g. kelp). NHPD recommends maintaining the current tolerance limit of 0.14 µg/kg bw/day for total arsenic in NHPs at the finished product stage. However, if total arsenic content in a particular NHP exceeds the current tolerance limit of 0.14 µg/kg bw/day (taking into account dosage and subpopulation), the applicant may undertake additional arsenic speciation testing to demonstrate that inorganic arsenic consumed by ingesting the product would be < 0.03 μg/kg bw/day and that organic arsenic consumed by ingesting the product would be < 20 µg/kg bw/day. Acknowledgements : This research project benefitted from scientific expertise within Health Canada Offices and Directorates, the United States Pharmacopoeia, and NSF International. References: [1] Environment Canada. 1999. Canadian Environmental Protection Act, List of Toxic Substances, Schedule 1, Item 28. URL: http://canadagazette.gc.ca/partII/2000/20000329/html/sor109-e.html accessed 2008–12-09. [2] ATSDR: Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. 2007. Toxicological Profile for Arsenic. US Department of Health and Human Services. URL: http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp 2 .html, accessed 2008-01-02. [3] Health Canada. 2007. Evidence for Quality of Finished Natural Health Products (Version 2). Natural Health Products Directorate. URL: http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/dhp-mps/prodnatur/legislation/docs/eq-paq_e.html, accessed 2008–12-09.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".