Insect Repellants During Pregnancy in the Era of the Zika Virus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Health care providers must be equipped to provide appropriate advice to reproductive-aged patients for protection against the potentially devastating consequences of prenatal Zika virus exposure. The goal of this commentary is to summarize what is known about the safety and toxicity of N,N-diethyl-meta-toluamide (DEET) as a topical insect repellant and the pyrethroid permethrin for treatment of fabric, endorsed in the fight against Zika virus. Reviews assessing the safety and toxicity of DEET conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Canadian Pest Management Regulatory Agency conclude that DEET has low acute toxicity and does not appear to pose a significant health concern to humans when used as directed. Some experimental animal and limited epidemiologic data suggest that prenatal pyrethroid exposure may adversely affect learning and behavior, but this level of evidence pales in comparison to the known risks of Zika virus to the fetal brain. The available evidence has led to the strong recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for use of these products by pregnant women as personal protection against mosquito bites in the fight against Zika virus infection. This message has been affirmed by our obstetrics and gynecology professional organizations. Because Zika virus is unlikely to be the last disease requiring vector control, those with environmental health expertise must continue to join with infectious disease specialists to communicate the potential vulnerability of our youngest (fetuses, infants, and young children) to vector-borne disease, both to the disease itself and to the strategies employed to mitigate the spread of such disease.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".