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Empowering citizens to manage their chemical exposures step 1 ‐ identify ingredients in consumer products
Author(s) -
Kim Jenna,
Blake Catherine,
Gabb Henry A.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
proceedings of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.193
H-Index - 14
ISSN - 2373-9231
DOI - 10.1002/pra2.72
Subject(s) - pubchem , ingredient , chemical toxicity , chemical agents , biochemical engineering , active ingredient , computer science , chemistry , food science , biology , engineering , bioinformatics , biochemistry , water pollutants , environmental chemistry
Our choices around consumer products directly influence our amount of chemical exposure. Although access to chemicals within individual products are available, we often use multiple products so ingredient names must be harmonized to accurately estimate cumulative exposure. We evaluated the accuracy and coverage of two strategies, PubChem and tmChem, with respect to a database of 55K products. More than half of the ingredients identified by PubChem were specific chemical names (55%), followed by natural or artificial colors (20%) and plants or plant derivatives (13%). The majority of ingredients identified by tmChem were chemical names (83.9%). Only 1,696 of the 8,247 (20.56%) were identified by both systems. Although tmChem had better coverage, ~70% of ingredients identified by tmChem need further work to align with a specific chemical. Both strategies are needed to provide an accurate, personalized, and cumulative measure of chemical exposure.