The Michigan-West Africa Geohealth Hub: Environmental Exposures Due to Informal E-Waste Recycling Activities and the Health of Workers
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Overview: The West Africa-Michigan CHARTER II GEOHealth Hub, jointly funded by the US NIH/FIC and Canada’s IDRC, integrates research and research training activities of West African Anglophone and Francophone institutions, with support from the University of Michigan and McGill University. Research Goal: To increase multi-disciplinary understanding of the risks associated with waste recycling, and to use study findings to inform evidence-based implementation activities and policy options at multi-levels. Specific Objectives: Include: 1) characterize work-related, time-varying, job-specific exposures of electronic waste recycling workers at the Agbogbloshie site, and assess biological markers of dose, to metals, organic compounds, and markers of combustion products; 2) provide estimates of potentially increased lifetime, work-exposure-associated cancer risks; and, 3) evaluate associations of exposures with measures of acute and chronic respiratory morbidity in workers. Methodology: A longitudinal design in which we enrolled a combined total of 151 study participants over a 3-week period. We collected and are analyzing, repeated measures across seasons for each participant: 1) biological samples for a) metals, b) organic compounds including flame retardants, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, dioxin-related compounds, and 2) personal air monitoring, through a combination of real-time measurements and analysis of size-specific samples collected on filters, including markers of combustion products. Results: Preliminary filter-based data show that e-waste workers have breathing zone PM2.5 concentrations of 135 ± 188 µg m-3 (mean ± st. dev., n = 89) compared to 45 ± 18 µg m-3 (n = 43) of controls; these worker exposures are considerably higher than levels obtained using area monitoring at the waste site, e.g., 84 ± 24 µg m-3 (n = 9). Based on real-time measurements, burning tasks resulted in exceptionally high PM2.5 exposures.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it