Is House Dust the Missing Exposure\nPathway for PBDEs? An Analysis of\nthe Urban Fate and Human Exposure\nto PBDEs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) body burdens in\nNorth America are 20 times that of Europeans and some\n“high accumulation” individuals have burdens up to 1−2\norders of magnitude higher than median values, the reasons\nfor which are not known. We estimated emissions and\nfate of ΣPBDEs (minus BDE-209) in a 470 km<sup>2</sup> area of Toronto,\nCanada, using the Multi-media Urban Model (MUM-Fate). Using a combination of measured and modeled\nconcentrations for indoor and outdoor air, soil, and dust\nplus measured concentrations in food, we estimated exposure\nto ΣPBDEs via soil, dust, and dietary ingestion and\nindoor and outdoor inhalation pathways. Fate calculations\nindicate that 57−85% of PBDE emissions to the outdoor\nenvironment originate from within Toronto and that\nthe dominant removal process is advection by air to\ndownwind locations. Inadvertent ingestion of house dust\nis the largest contributor to exposure of toddlers through to\nadults and is thus the main exposure pathway for all life\nstages other than the infant, including the nursing mother,\nwho transfers PBDEs to her infant via human milk. The\nnext major exposure pathway is dietary ingestion of animal\nand dairy products. Infant consumption of human milk is\nthe largest contributor to lifetime exposure. Inadvertent\ningestion of dust is the main exposure pathway for a scenario\nof occupational exposure in a computer recycling facility\nand a fish eater. Ingestion of dust can lead to almost 100-fold higher exposure than “average” for a toddler with a\nhigh dust intake rate living in a home in which PBDE\nconcentrations are elevated.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.031 | 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".