Flame Retardants (polybrominated diphenyl ethers, PBDEs) and Organophoshates, OPFRs) In Dust from Canadian Fire Stations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dust is a good medium to assess indoor exposures to many persistent organics, including flame retardants. With concerns regarding persistence, bioaccumulation and toxicity of many flame retardants, a series of bans and regulations have created shifts in their usage. For firefighters, exposures to flame retardants on and off duty is a high concern. In 2018 we measured flame retardants in Canadian fire station dust and compared our findings with those of our 2015 US fire stations study. We used isotope dilution HRMS for PBDEs and GC-MS/MS for OPFRs. The same flame retardants were present in all stations with high within- and between-station variability. The most prominent among PBDEs was BDE-209, followed by BDE-99. TDCIPP and TPhP were the dominant OPFRs. Overall, data from 2015 (US) and 2018 (Canada) show that OPFRs have surpassed PBDEs in fire station dust, probably reflecting shifts in flame retardant use in consumer products and building materials.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 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".