Comments on Organophosphate Pesticide Urinary Metabolites Among Latino Immigrants, North Carolina Farmworkers and Non-farmworkers Compared (Arcury TA et al. JOEM (2016)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Readers are invited to submit letters for publication in this department. Submit letters online at http://joem.edmgr.com. Choose “Submit New Manuscript.” A signed copyright assignment and financial disclosure form must be submitted with the letter. Form available at http://www.joem.org under Author and Reviewer information. To the Editor: The principal findings of the paper by Arcury et al1 comparing organophosphate pesticide (OP) urinary metabolites among male North Carolina Latino farmworkers and non-farmworkers clearly demonstrate that there was essentially no difference in OP pesticide urinary metabolites between the two groups. This would normally suggest the conclusion that farmworkers in this study were not occupationally exposed to OP pesticides or that occupational OP exposure in these farmworkers was not detected. Astonishingly, the authors ignore these notions in the conclusion and abstract of their paper. The authors compound their lack of objectivity by suggesting in their conclusions that a mishmash of construction, maintenance, manufacturing, and other workers might have similar occupational exposures to OP pesticides as farmworkers, a dubious proposal at best. Moreover, these results, confirmed by others,2 put into question previous work by the same authors3 that implied that OP pesticide urinary metabolites in North Carolina farmworkers were of occupational origin. That study found similar levels of OP urinary metabolites, but no comparison group was tested. Perhaps the authors should take a different point of view. Unfortunately, they make only passing reference to regulations in the early 2000s that restricted the use of some OP pesticides and do not explore the impact of these and other regulations on modern agricultural practices. Perhaps, the largely regulatory-driven improvements in agricultural pesticide use do protect farmworkers from occupational pesticide exposure even among the most vulnerable workers. If so, this would be a regulatory success story, a story that, given the vehement anti-regulation rhetoric emanating from the newly elected Administration, should be shouted from the rooftops and not swept under the carpet in a misguided attempt at political rectitude. Sincerely.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.086 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.004 |
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".