Adverse health consequences following aerial spraying with Bacillus thuringiensis (var. kursraki) (Btk) to control the gypsy moth: flaws in government risk assessments and in public health officials' attitudes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis is noteworthy for its ability to infect fatally the digestive tract of moths, butterflies and other insects, making it an attractive biological agent to control insects that can damage crops and trees. One subspecies B. thuringiensis (var. kurstaki) is used in commercial preparations such as Foray 48B that can be applied as a spray on the ground or from aircraft. The latter approach is especially appealing as large areas can be sprayed at relatively low cost. The use of such spraying in populated, urban areas often results in reports of illnesses such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, stomach cramps, respiratory and eye irritation and severe itchiness in a small percentage of exposed individuals. Such was the case in London, Ontario in May of 2009. Officialdom often is dismissive of the public’s concerns, presumably considering them to be either psychosomatic in nature or unrelated to the spray exposure. There is, however, medical and scientific evidence that this is not the case and that B. thuringiensis is capable of causing infections in humans more often than generally believed. This evidence is reviewed here.
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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) | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".