Efficacy of composting to decontaminate Cryptococcus gattii-colonized plant waste
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cryptococcus gattii is a human fungal pathogen that emerged on Vancouver Island, BC in 1999. This study aimed to investigate C. gattii survival in composting systems and occupational exposure to C. gattii in work tasks associated with composting. The presence of C. gattii was monitored in composting feedstock and product for one calendar year in a municipal composting facility in Cumberland, BC. Additionally, the survival of an environmental C. gattii isolate was tested in a composting experiment conducted with custom-designed composters that simulated in-vessel composting and home backyard composting. Potential inhalation occupational exposure to C. gattii while performing composting-related tasks were measured during residential yard waste chipping by city workers in Parksville, BC and during the composting experiment where C. gattii contaminated feedstock was composted. C. gattii persisted through three out of five in-vessel composting trials despite high composting temperatures (mean > 60ºC, peak 85ºC) which were achieved evenly throughout the composting material for long periods (> 65 hours). C. gattii was also detected in one out of two yard composting trials after 60 days of composting. The year-long composting feedstock and compost monitoring for C. gattii returned no positive samples. Air sampling during composting-related work tasks found no detectable level of C. gattii. Current composting standard and practice in BC are unlikely to be adequate in eliminating C. gattii from contaminated composting feedstock. Based on the results of this study, the risks of occupational exposure to C. gattii during residential yard waste chipping and composting of contaminated material are low.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".