Leather Contains Cobalt and Poses a Risk of Allergic Contact Dermatitis: Cobalt Indicator Solution and X-ray Florescence Spectrometry as Screening Tests
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Cobalt was recently identified in a leather couch responsible for dermatitis. Cobalt content/release in leather in the United States is unknown. We evaluated leather for cobalt content/release and investigated screening methods for identifying cobalt in leather. METHODS: One hundred thirty-one leather swatches were screened for cobalt content/release with X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometry and cobalt indicator solution (CIS). Samples with positive screens and 1 negative control were analyzed using inductively-coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICPMS). RESULTS: CIS showed that 5 of 131 samples contained cobalt, subsequently found to be between 1 and 190 parts per million (ppm) when evaluated with ICPMS. The XRF analysis showed that 6 samples contained >5% cobalt, subsequently found to contain greater than 300 ppm cobalt by ICPMS. 7 of 12 tested swatches contained cobalt in excess of 100 ppm. One sample contained greater than 1000 ppm cobalt. The prevalence of swatches containing cobalt at levels in excess of 190 ppm was at least 5% (n = 7; total, N = 131). DISCUSSION: Some leather consumer goods contain and release cobalt. Cobalt indicator solution is a poor screening test for cobalt in leather while XRF screening may be effective. Leather is a new source of cobalt exposure. Exposures to metal allergens are changing in ways that impact clinical decision making.
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 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".