Effects of Inhalation Exposure to a Binary Mixture of Benzene and Toluene on Vitamin A Status and Humoral and Cell-Mediated Immunity in Wild and Captive American Kestrels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Benzene and toluene are representative volatile organic compounds (VOC) released during production, storage, and transportation associated with the oil and gas industry and are chemicals of concern, as they are released in greater and possibly more biologically significant concentrations than other compounds. Most studies of air pollution in high oil and gas activity areas have neglected to consider risks to birds, including top-level predators. Birds can be used as highly sensitive monitors of air quality and since the avian respiratory tract is physiologically different from a rodent respiratory tract, effects of gases cannot be safely extrapolated from rodent studies. Wild and captive male American kestrels were exposed for approximately 1 h daily for 28 d to high (rodent lowest-observed-adverse-effect level [LOAEL] of 10 ppm and 80 ppm, respectively) or environmentally relevant (0.1 ppm and 0.8 ppm, respectively) levels of benzene and toluene. Altered immune responses characteristic of those seen in mammalian exposures were evident in kestrels. A decreased cell-mediated immunity, measured by delayed-type hypersensitivity testing, was evident in all exposed birds. There was no effect on humoral immunity. Plasma retinol levels as measured by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) analysis were decreased in wild and captive kestrels exposed to the rodent LOAEL for combined benzene and toluene. This study indicates that American kestrels are sensitive to combined benzene and toluene. The study also illustrates the need for reference concentrations for airborne pollutants to be calculated, including sensitive endpoints specific to birds. Based on these findings, future studies need to include immune endpoints to determine the possible increased susceptibility of birds to inhaled toxicants.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".