ATSDR 2005 — ToxFAQs for Tin and Tin Compounds

The August 2005 ATSDR ToxFAQs fact sheet (Tox fact sheet #55) is the two-page consumer-facing summary of the ATSDR 2005 Toxicological Profile for Tin and Compounds (Update). It carries no primary data of its own; its function in the wiki corpus is to document the US federal occupational and food-additive regulatory framework for tin and tin compounds as the agency communicated it to non-specialist audiences in 2005, and to capture the public-health framing ATSDR used to distinguish inorganic tin from the substantially more toxic organotin compounds. The full quantitative profile lives in the sibling page atsdr2005-tin-toxicological-profile.

Key numbers

• OSHA workplace air limits. Organotin compounds — 0.1 mg/m³. Inorganic tin compounds, except oxides — 2.0 mg/m³. (The fact sheet does not attach an averaging period to either PEL; OSHA’s underlying PELs are eight-hour time-weighted averages, but the fact sheet does not say so.) The twenty-fold occupational limit gap is the regulatory expression of the same inorganic-vs-organotin toxicity differential that the full toxicological profile expresses through the MRL ladder.
• FDA food-contact and food-additive regulation. FDA regulates the use of some organic tin compounds in coatings and plastic food packaging. FDA has also set limits for the use of an inorganic tin compound, stannous chloride, as a food additive. The fact sheet does not state numeric values for either; they live in the underlying FDA regulations cited by the full toxicological profile.
• NPL site occurrence (1,662 total NPL sites at time of writing). Metallic tin and inorganic tin compounds — identified at at least 214 sites. Organic tin compounds — identified at at least 8 sites.
• Tin-lined can lacquering prevalence. Greater than 90 percent of tin-lined cans used for food are protected with lacquer (the lacquer prevents the elemental-tin-to-canned-food dissolution reaction).
• Cancer classification status (as of 2005). DHHS, IARC, and EPA have not classified metallic tin or inorganic tin compounds for carcinogenicity. EPA has determined that tributyltin oxide is not classifiable as to human carcinogenicity. Triphenyltin hydroxide produced cancer in rats and mice after long-term oral administration in published animal studies.

Methods (brief)

ATSDR ToxFAQs fact sheet; no analytical methods. Two-page consumer-facing summary distilled from the parallel ATSDR 2005 Toxicological Profile for Tin and Compounds (Update), which is cited as the sole reference. Health-effects framing follows the standard ATSDR ToxFAQs structure: what the substance is, environmental fate, exposure routes, health effects (general adult), cancer, children, exposure-reduction guidance, biomonitoring, and federal regulation. No original data; no derived MRLs (the MRLs live in the full profile); no exposure modeling.

Evidence fitness

This source supports context only. It restates qualitative conclusions and a small set of regulatory values from the underlying ATSDR 2005 toxicological profile and from OSHA / FDA standards in force at time of writing. It carries no occurrence measurements, no LODs, no sampling strata, and no statistical summaries. Cite this page when a wiki claim needs the US-federal consumer-health framing for tin (the inorganic-vs-organotin split as ATSDR communicated it to the public, the OSHA workplace limits, the FDA food-contact framework, the >90 percent lacquer prevalence in tin-lined food cans). Do not cite this page as primary evidence for any tin concentration in any food matrix; route those claims to the sibling toxicological profile or to primary occurrence studies.

Implications

• Certification: Captures the US-federal occupational and food-additive regulatory frame for tin (OSHA 0.1 mg/m³ organotins; OSHA 2.0 mg/m³ inorganic tin except oxides; FDA stannous-chloride food-additive limits; FDA organic-tin food-contact-coating regulation) in the form the agency communicated to non-specialist audiences. The factual content overlaps entirely with the full toxicological profile sibling page; this page exists in the corpus so that future regulatory-affairs queries that name “ATSDR ToxFAQs” or “tfacts55” can land on the document by name rather than being redirected to the longer profile.
• Courses: Useful as a one-page consumer-health-communications artifact in any educator-facing module on how federal agencies translate the species-stratified MRL framework (inorganic tin at intermediate-duration oral MRL 0.3 mg/kg/day; tributyltin oxide at intermediate and chronic oral MRL 0.0003 mg/kg/day per the full profile) into a public-facing risk message.
• App: No contamination_profile contribution. The page is qualitative federal communication, not occurrence data.

Provenance notes

Source PDF is the ATSDR ToxFAQs fact sheet for tin (filename tfacts55 2.pdf indicates the second copy of fact sheet #55 in the Manual Fetch Kimi June 3 batch). The fact sheet is a US government work and is in the public domain. The canonical URL points to ATSDR’s hosted PDF at atsdr.cdc.gov; the document is referenced as “TIN AND TIN COMPOUNDS — Division of Toxicology ToxFAQs — August 2005” in its own header. The single reference cited by the fact sheet is the ATSDR 2005 Toxicological Profile for Tin and Compounds (Update), which is the sibling source page atsdr2005-tin-toxicological-profile. No DOI is assigned.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• tin
• tin-inorganic
• organotins

Verification notes

• This is a NEW-path ingest, not a merge-enhance. The identity-check sweep (DOI grep, raw_handle grep, cite-key grep including the tfacts55 string) returned no existing wiki source page for ToxFAQs fact sheet #55. The sibling source atsdr2005-tin-toxicological-profile is a different ATSDR publication (the 300+ page Toxicological Profile Update referenced by this fact sheet) and is recorded in near_duplicates accordingly; the two pages are deliberately separate because ATSDR distributes them as separate documents under distinct canonical URLs and a future regulatory-affairs query naming “ToxFAQs” or “tfacts55” needs to land on a page that bears the fact-sheet identity.
• metals: carries Sn only because the fact sheet is tin-specific; species: enumerates the inorganic and organotin compounds the fact sheet names by name (stannous chloride, stannous sulfide, stannic oxide on the inorganic side; dibutyltin, tributyltin, tributyltin oxide, triphenyltin, triphenyltin hydroxide, trimethyltin, triethyltin on the organotin side).
• ingredients: and products: are intentionally empty. The fact sheet’s only ingredient/product mentions are qualitative (“food contaminated with these compounds,” “canned products,” “seafood from coastal waters,” “tin-lined cans for food, beverages, and aerosols”) and do not carry any per-ingredient or per-product occurrence value. The routing audit will record products and ingredients as advisory-missing, which is the correct posture for a federal consumer-health fact sheet with no occurrence data.
• The OSHA workplace-air limits quoted (0.1 mg/m³ organotins, 2.0 mg/m³ inorganic tin except oxides) are taken verbatim from the fact sheet’s “Has the federal government made recommendations to protect human health?” section, page 2. No interpretive synthesis is added.
• Audit subagent (2026-06-04) flagged that an earlier revision attached “(eight-hour time-weighted average)” to the OSHA PEL values; verified against the PDF — the fact sheet does not state an averaging period. The 8-hour TWA is in fact how OSHA expresses these PELs in the underlying CFR, but to keep this source page strictly faithful to what the fact sheet itself reports, the parenthetical TWA framing has been removed from the Key numbers bullet and the contextual note added in its place.
• Audit subagent (2026-06-04) flagged that matrices: [drinking-water] overstated the PDF, which discusses water only as an environmental compartment (binding to sediment, persistence in water for organotin) and not as a human drinking-water exposure route. Verified; drinking-water removed from matrices:. Remaining matrices (canned-food, seafood, workplace-air) are the three the fact sheet explicitly frames as human exposure routes.
• The fact sheet uses the phrase “metallic tin and inorganic tin compounds have been found in at least 214 of the 1,662 National Priority List (NPL) sites” on page 1; “Organic tin compounds have been identified in at least 8 of the NPL sites” follows immediately. Both NPL counts are reproduced verbatim.
• No brand-firewall or wiki/HMTc-firewall concerns surfaced; the fact sheet names no brands and makes no HMT&C-comparable threshold claims.

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.