Are We Exposed to Halogenated Flame Retardants from both Primary and Secondary Sources?
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
Halogenated flame retardants (HFRs) were measured in air, floor dust, and surface wipes of electronic devices (e-devices) and hands of participants in 51 Canadian homes to assess the relationship between HFR levels in these matrices and to identify major sources and exposure pathways. Hand-held e-devices had significantly higher concentrations of all HFRs than non-hand-held devices, with the exceptions being decabromodiphenyl ethane (DBDPE) and decabromodiphenyl ether (BDE-209). HFR concentrations on hands were correlated with levels in dust and hand-held e-devices, with the strongest correlations being seen for BDE-47 and -99, 2-ethylhexyl-2,3,4,5-tetrabromobenzoate (EH-TBB), and bis(3-ethylhexyl) tetrabromophthalate (BEH-TEBP). It is highly unlikely that hand-held devices sampled in 2015 had intentionally added BDE-47 and -99 that were regulated in 2008 in Canada. We hypothesize that hands transferred these chemicals from older products, which act as primary sources, to hand-held devices, which then can act as secondary sources of exposure. This study also found evidence for TVs as a primary source of DBDPE and BDE-209 for dust, hand-held devices, and hands. We suggest that an outdated, overly stringent flammability standard, developed in the 1970s to protect against fires from “instant-on” cathode ray tube TVs, led to elevated levels of these HFRs indoors. Although the standard for TV enclosures has been updated recently, the legacy of the outdated standard persists.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it