Microbiology of sands and its impact on human health
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Issue Recent studies suggest that sand constitute a reservoir potential pathogenic microorganisms at beach sites, sandboxes and recreational areas world-wide, leading to public health threats, health costs and economic losses. Recreational water quality monitoring mainly focus on bacterial indicators that cause gastro-intestinal (GI) illness. Description of the problem The most recent European bathing water directive indicates that areas surrounding recreational water constitute a possible contamination source. However the directive lacks the 2003 WHO recommendation of sand monitoring, especially in regions where beach users stay mainly on the sand due to low water temperatures. Recent epidemiological studies and data collected during a 5 year beach sand monitoring program of the Portuguese coast support this recommendation. Changes Given the diversity of microbes found in sand, further studies are needed to identify the most significant aetiologic agents of disease and to relate these to human health risk. Although other microbes have been documented, monitoring sandboxes is currently limited to measurements of Toxocara eggs. An emerging group of fungi of particular relevance includes black, endemic and azole resistant fungi. In non-coastal settings. Cryptococcus gattii, has also been gaining significance as the cause of a serious meningitis outbreak in Vancouver, Canada. In order to address these situations, sampling microorganisms in sand should be considered a public health policy priority, and therefore included in regulatory programs aimed at protecting recreational users from infectious disease. Lessons Overall, environmental and epidemiological studies to investigate the link between fungi exposure in sand and human health are recommended. Also, sand analysis and sampling procedures need to be reviewed in order to ensure representativeness of the site. Efforts should focus on evaluating viruses believed to be the main cause of GI illness in beach environments. Key messages: Sampling microorganisms in sand should be considered a public health policy priority, and therefore included in regulatory programs aimed at protecting recreational users from infectious disease Awareness of decision-makers and regulators at different levels of decision is of utmost importance
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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 | 0.015 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".