Risk of sensitization and allergy in Ragweed workers – a pilot study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Due to its high allergenic potential Ambrosia artemisiifolia has become a health threat in many European countries during the last few decades. Hence, several cities and communities initiated ragweed eradication campaigns. In Berlin, Germany, so-called Ambrosia scouts are being assigned the task of finding and eliminating this weed. We sought to evaluate the potential risk of sensitization and allergy in these individuals. FINDINGS: In order to assess the risk of sensitization and allergy, we followed-up 20 Ambrosia scouts by skin-prick test with inhalant allergens, immunoserological and pulmonary function tests. Additionally, medical conditions were evaluated by a questionnaire especially designed for this study. Despite close contact to ragweed over a median duration of 13.8 months, none of the participants became sensitized or allergic to ragweed. One individual developed a clinical non-relevant sensitization towards the taxiconomically-related plant mugwort. A decline in relative FEV1 was most probably due to heavy smoking. CONCLUSIONS: Our surprising findings suggest that intensive contact and exposure to high ragweed pollen concentrations do not necessarily result in sensitization and/or allergy, meaning that the allergenic potential of this weed might be lower than hitherto expected. However, it is also conceivable that continuous exposure to high allergen levels induced tolerance in the ragweed workers. Due to the relatively small number of subjects studied, our results might be biased and therefore investigations on larger study groups are needed.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".