Assessment of the Presence of Soil Lead Contamination Near a Former Lead Smelter in Mombasa, Kenya
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The informal settlement of Owino Uhuru near an abandoned lead smelter attracted international attention due to an apparent lead poisoning event. Despite this attention, the environmental data collected to date do not indicate high levels of residual contamination. OBJECTIVES: To further confirm previous findings and determine any necessary risk mitigation measures, an assessment of surface soil lead concentrations was conducted in the community. METHODS: soil measurements were taken using an Innov-X tube-based (40 kV) alpha X-ray fluorescence instrument (pXRF). RESULTS: The assessment found that mean surface soil lead concentrations in areas conducive to exposure were 110 mg/kg (95% CI: 54-168); below United States Environmental Protection Agency and the Environment Canada screening levels of 400 mg/kg and 140 mg/kg, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: There is likely no current need for risk mitigation activities in the community. These results could inform discussions on the allocation of public health spending. COMPETING INTERESTS: The authors declare no competing financial interests. BE, VOO, CN and JSF are employees of Pure Earth. MPT sits on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Health and Pollution.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".