Kandovan the next ‘Capadoccia’? – A potential public health issue for erionite related mesothelioma risk
Post-publication record
Source: Retraction Watch, joined by DOI. OpenAlex records retraction as is_retracted, a boolean over a state space with at least four values, so it cannot express an expression of concern, a correction or a reinstatement; it reports them as false, which reads as “fine”.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background:The Kandovan region in Iran is physically and geologically similar to the Cappadocian region in Turkey where fibrous zeolites, including erionite, have been found in volcanic tuffs. In some Cappodocian villages there is strong evidence that erionite, and possibly related minerals, are responsible for the high level of mesothelioma found there. So, although mesothelioma clusters have not been reported in Kandovan, it is a plausible hypothesis that many cases of mesothelioma in Iran may be due to naturally occurring fibrous zeolites.Methods: A detailed study of Iranian geology was made to determine similarities between the Kandovan region and Cappadocia, ‘inter-mountain zones’ in the Western US and Mexico. Areas where mesothelioma cases probably attributable to erionite exposure have been found. Results:Although there is a long history of asbestos use in Iran many cases of mesothelioma do not present with positive asbestos exposure histories. Since fibrous zeolites are so widespread, why have not more mesotheliomas attributable to them been found throughout Iran? Various possible reasons were explored including misdiagnosis, poor surveillance, a general lack of awareness that this tumor may be linked to mineral fibre exposure. There is also the analytical problem of identifying fibrous erionite in lung tissue.Conclusions:There is every reason to believe mesotheliomas due to fibrous zeolite including erionite will be found in Iran. The most likely places to find them are the villages that look very similar to those found in Cappadocia since these are based upon similar geological formations.
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 | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 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) | 0.001 | 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 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".