Patch Testing with Thimerosal in a Canadian Center: An 11-Year Experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Thimerosal has been used for decades as an antiseptic, a disinfectant, and a preservative in various consumer products. It is also a notoriously frequent contact allergen, but the significance of positive patch-test reactions has been debated over the past decade. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to assess the prevalence and relevance of positive patch-test reactions to thimerosal in a large Canadian center and to compare our results with those of previous publications. METHODS: A retrospective analysis of data collected over the course of 11 years in the contact dermatitis clinic of a university hospital was performed. RESULTS: Of 2252 subjects patch-tested for thimerosal, positive reactions were observed in 102 individuals (4.53%), placing thimerosal as the fifth most common allergen in our practice. The sensitization rate was equivalent between the patients who underwent aimed patch testing and those who were routinely tested for reaction to thimerosal when this allergen was included in our standard patch-testing series 8 years into the study. There was an increased incidence of thimerosal sensitization in chemists and laboratory technicians, as well as in health care workers, including medical doctors, registered nurses, dentists, and dental assistants. While eight reactions were deemed possibly relevant, in none of the cases was it possible to definitely establish the relevance of positive reactions to thimerosal, either because the presence of this allergen could not be verified in patients' products or because patch testing with these products gave negative results. CONCLUSION: In agreement with previous reports, we conclude that even though positive reactions to thimerosal are frequent, very few seem to be clinically relevant.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".