Assessment of consumer exposure to boron in cleaning products: a case study of Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Boron is an essential mineral for plants, and as such, is a normal dietary constituent for humans. Humans may be naturally exposed to boron through food and drinking water, or via anthropogenic sources such as consumer products. The World Health Organisation established an acceptable safe range of population mean intakes for boron of 1-13 mg/day. Most studies of dietary boron intake show a range of 1-2 mg/day. Consumer products have been estimated to contribute a geometric mean daily intake of 0.1 mg to total boron exposure; however, there are few published surveys of consumer exposure to boron from use of cleaning products. The Government of Canada published a draft screening assessment report of boric acid, its salts and precursors that included estimates of consumer exposure to boron found as ingredients in consumer products. The manufacturers of consumer cleaning products conducted a survey of boron content of current products and estimated exposure using the publicly available exposure tool ConsExpo Web. Dermal exposures to boron during cleaning product use were estimated to result in annual internal exposures ranging from ≪0.001 to 0.36 μg/kg bw/day based on dermal absorption of 0.5%. Using a conservative point of departure for hazard assessment (2,900 μg boron/kg bw/day), estimated margins of exposure for dermal exposures to boron from cleaning product use range from 8,056 to >1,000,000. This work demonstrates that exposure to boron from cleaning product use is very low and essentially insignificant when compared to other (e.g. dietary) sources of boron intake by Canadian consumers.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".