From the journal Environmental Science: Atmospheres Peer review history

14-Aug-2021

Dear Dr Aravindakumar:

Manuscript ID: EA-ART-05-2021-000033
TITLE: Outdoor and Indoor natural background gamma radiation across Kerala, India

Thank you for your submission to Environmental Science: Atmospheres, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. I sent your manuscript to reviewers and I have now received their reports which are copied below.

I have carefully evaluated your manuscript and the reviewers’ reports, and the reports indicate that major revisions are necessary.

Please submit a revised manuscript which addresses all of the reviewers’ comments. Further peer review of your revised manuscript may be needed. When you submit your revised manuscript please include a point by point response to the reviewers’ comments and highlight the changes you have made. Full details of the files you need to submit are listed at the end of this email.

Please submit your revised manuscript as soon as possible using this link:

*** PLEASE NOTE: This is a two-step process. After clicking on the link, you will be directed to a webpage to confirm. ***

https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/esatmos?link_removed

(This link goes straight to your account, without the need to log on to the system. For your account security you should not share this link with others.)

Alternatively, you can login to your account (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/esatmos) where you will need your case-sensitive USER ID and password.

You should submit your revised manuscript as soon as possible; please note you will receive a series of automatic reminders. If your revisions will take a significant length of time, please contact me. If I do not hear from you, I may withdraw your manuscript from consideration and you will have to resubmit. Any resubmission will receive a new submission date.

The Royal Society of Chemistry requires all submitting authors to provide their ORCID iD when they submit a revised manuscript. This is quick and easy to do as part of the revised manuscript submission process. We will publish this information with the article, and you may choose to have your ORCID record updated automatically with details of the publication.

Please also encourage your co-authors to sign up for their own ORCID account and associate it with their account on our manuscript submission system. For further information see: https://www.rsc.org/journals-books-databases/journal-authors-reviewers/processes-policies/#attribution-id

Environmental Science: Atmospheres strongly encourages authors of research articles to include an ‘Author contributions’ section in their manuscript, for publication in the final article. This should appear immediately above the ‘Conflict of interest’ and ‘Acknowledgement’ sections. I strongly recommend you use CRediT (the Contributor Roles Taxonomy from CASRAI, https://casrai.org/credit/) for standardised contribution descriptions. All authors should have agreed to their individual contributions ahead of submission and these should accurately reflect contributions to the work. Please refer to our general author guidelines http://www.rsc.org/journals-books-databases/journal-authors-reviewers/author-responsibilities/ for more information.

I look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Yours sincerely,
Dr Claudia Mohr

Associate Editor, Environmental Science: Atmospheres

************

Reviewer 1

This is a very important study and I congratulate the authors for their attempt. However, the article has some important issues that need to addressed..
!. The title of this article is "Outdoor and Indoor natural background gamma radiation across Kerala, India". I did not understand whether the focus of this paper is only (a) the dose measurements or (b) relate the dose measurements to the biological effect to provide the readers an overall picture. This needs to be very critically mentioned.
2. If the article only concentrates only on the point (a) then this study is still good but not that impactful.
3. Thus, I recommend that the authors do address the point (b) in my comment 1.
4. For that, I suggest the following literature to addressed and additional data to be presented:
(a) Mutat Res Genet Toxicol Environ Mutagen. 2018 Apr;828:23-29.
(b) Mutat Res Genet Toxicol Environ Mutagen. 2016 Apr;800-801:40-5.
(c) https://doi.org/10.2307/3580134
(d) https://academic.oup.com/mutage/article/32/2/267/2452338?login=true
5. Thus, the authors should present new experimental data, connect the physical dose with biological consequences and revise the paper accordingly.
6. I would like to review the revised version.

Reviewer 2

General Comments: The sum of public exposure to radiation is both from natural and man-made sources: of which the natural sources are known to be varies from region to region, which depends upon many physical variables; nevertheless its proportion is expected to be remains similar range over a period of time within the region/locality. A health effect due to the natural background radiation is inconsistent in view of existing and newer biological effects in specific the low dose and low dose radiation exposure. Accurate dosimetry at in wider locality can be better related to the possible health effects due to chronic low dose/low dose rate radiation exposure. Towards this objective the study was aimed to measure natural background gamma radiation (72 outdoor sites and 32 indoor sites) covering entire state of Kerala, one of a natural high background area within India. Thermo Luminescent Dosimeters (TLDs) and Radiation Survey meter were used for the detection. Among the 14 regions monitored over a period of two years, Kollam district (2.32 mGy/yr) showed the maximum and Malappuram district (0.64mGy/yr) showed the minimum outdoor values. Similar variation on the level of indoor radiation was also observed (1.69 mGy/yr and 1.64 mGy/yr). Highest Annual Effective Dose (AED) was observed in Chavara area as it is located in High Background Radiation Area (HBRA) and highest radiation values were observed in concrete houses. It was also found that the indoor dosage levels were 1.5 times higher than the outdoor levels. As claimed by the authors, the reviewer agrees that the results have a high importance as the values are not common and very specific to this region. In view of the uniqueness, the manuscript may be considered for publication.

Specific comments:
• Page, 5 Line 4: Introduction: “Taking into account … contribute about 97.7 % whereas a mere 2.3% is generated by man-made sources” At present the proportion of natural to that man-made source is about 84-87% and 13-16%. Please cite recent info.. e.g ref no 13 cited by the authours
• Page, 6 Lines 9: Introduction: “But there is no data available in the literature …. various areas across the state”. Why the authors think that the level of gamma radiation differs within the state? How it was assured that the contribution of background is only from gamma without contamination from other types such as alpha (220Rn and 224Ra)?
• Page No 7; Line 4: Methods: “thickness was… gamma radiation”. Is the TLD disc indigenous, or commercially obtained? Was it calibrated before the use?
• Page, 11 Lines 33: Indoor radiation level: “A total of 32 sites were monitored… districts in the state of Kerala”. What were the criteria adopted to select this 32 sites?
• Page, 14 Lines 6: the I/O ratio is 0.59 or 0.56?
• Page, 19 Lines 10: Conclusion: “Indoor to outdoor gamma radiation ratio varied from 0.59 to 2.13.It was found from the indoor to outdoor dosage ratio that the radiation dosage in …. the houses”. Are the reported values is the average measurements for the period of two years at each study site or for a particular period? Was there any seasonal variation of the indoor dose was observed? If so how it was accounted?

Answers to Reviewers Comments
Referee: 1

Comments to the Author
This is a very important study and I congratulate the authors for their attempt. However, the article has some important issues that need to addressed..
!. The title of this article is "Outdoor and Indoor natural background gamma radiation across Kerala, India". I did not understand whether the focus of this paper is only (a) the dose measurements or (b) relate the dose measurements to the biological effect to provide the readers an overall picture. This needs to be very critically mentioned.
2. If the article only concentrates only on the point (a) then this study is still good but not that impactful.
3. Thus, I recommend that the authors do address the point (b) in my comment 1.
4. For that, I suggest the following literature to addressed and additional data to be presented:
(a) Mutat Res Genet Toxicol Environ Mutagen. 2018 Apr;828:23-29.
(b) Mutat Res Genet Toxicol Environ Mutagen. 2016 Apr;800-801:40-5.
(c) https://doi.org/10.2307/3580134
(d) https://academic.oup.com/mutage/article/32/2/267/2452338?login=true
5. Thus, the authors should present new experimental data, connect the physical dose with biological consequences and revise the paper accordingly.
6. I would like to review the revised version.

Answers for point nr.1-5: We appreciate your suggestion. As projected in the manuscript, we only concentrated on the dose measurement of background radiation in the entire province. It is the first step towards understanding the biological impact. On the other hand, understanding the biological effect is a long term process and many agencies have started such work in those areas where the background radiation is high. Therefore, it is practically impossible to provide such data within a short span of time. It is also highlighted that one of the recent reports indicated People who live in high background radiation areas (HBRAs) such as Kerala and Ramsar do not record any detrimental biological effects(S M J M, Gh M, S A R M, M P. Is Induction of Anomalies in Lymphocytes of the Residents of High Background Radiation Areas Associated with Increased Cancer Risk? J Biomed Phys Eng. 2019;9(3):367-372Published 2019 Jun 1. doi:10.31661/jbpe. v9i3Jun.654.). The purpose of the work was to understand not only in the outdoor background radiation, but indoor as well.
Referee: 2

Specific comments:
• Page, 5 Line 4: Introduction: “Taking into account … contribute about 97.7 % whereas a mere 2.3% is generated by man-made sources”. At present the proportion of natural to that man-made source is about 84-87% and 13-16%. Please cite recent info.e.g ref no 13 cited by the authours.
We have cited the new reference (line number : 43 – 44).
K. Kovler, H. Friedmann, B. Michalik, W. Schroeyers, A. Tsapalov, S. Antropov, T. Bituh and D. Nicolaides, in Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials in Construction, ed. W. Schroeyers, Woodhead Publishing, 2017, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102009-8.00003-7, pp. 13-36.

• Page, 6 Lines 9: Introduction: “But there is no data available in the literature …. various areas across the state”. Why the authors think that the level of gamma radiation differs within the state? How it was assured that the contribution of background is only from gamma without contamination from other types such as alpha (220 Rn and 224 Ra)?
There may be chances of contamination. However, we also used a handheld portable survey meter (Polimaster: PM 1405 SURVEY METER +) at the study sites to monitor the gamma radiation dose exclusively. The values obtained were compared to the results from TLD measurements. We were able to observe similar readings. Some location in southern coast of Kerala has high background radiation due to the presence of monazite sand. So, radiation from alpha and beta are not that significant.
The gamma radiation was also measured using a handheld
• Page No 7; Line 4: Methods: “thickness was… gamma radiation”. Is the TLD disc indigenous, or commercially obtained? Was it calibrated before the use?
The TLD used for the study was calibrated before the measurements. These dosimeters were developed by BARC (Bhabha Atomic Research Centre), India.

• Page, 11 Lines 33: Indoor radiation level: “A total of 32 sites were monitored… districts in the state of Kerala”. What were the criteria adopted to select this 32 sites?
For indoor radiation: 1 TLD/million population and for outdoor: 1 TLD/625 km2 of the study area (line number 114 -115). These sites were chosen based on the availability of the TLDs and their distribution across different districts within the state of Kerala.

• Page, 14 Lines 6: the I/O ratio is 0.59 or 0.56?
It is 0.59, we have made the corrections now in the manuscript (line number: 269)

• Page, 19 Lines 10: Conclusion: “Indoor to outdoor gamma radiation ratio varied from 0.59 to 2.13. It was found from the indoor to outdoor dosage ratio that the radiation dosage in …. the houses”. Are the reported values is the average measurements for the period of two years at each study site or for a particular period? Was there any seasonal variation of the indoor dose was observed? If so how it was accounted?
The reported values are the average measurements. The TLDs were changed every 3 months. We could not observe any significant seasonal variation.

15-Sep-2021

Dear Dr Aravindakumar:

Manuscript ID: EA-ART-05-2021-000033.R1
TITLE: Outdoor and Indoor natural background gamma radiation across Kerala, India

Thank you for submitting your revised manuscript to Environmental Science: Atmospheres. After considering the changes you have made, I am pleased to accept your manuscript for publication in its current form. I have copied any final comments from the reviewer(s) below.

You will shortly receive a separate email from us requesting you to submit a licence to publish for your article, so that we can proceed with publication of your manuscript.

You can highlight your article and the work of your group on the back cover of Environmental Science: Atmospheres, if you are interested in this opportunity please contact me for more information.

We will publicise your paper on our Twitter account @EnvSciRSC – to aid our publicity of your work please fill out this form: https://form.jotform.com/211263048265047

For tips on how to publicise your research, please visit: https://www.rsc.org/journals-books-databases/about-journals/maximise-your-impact/

Discover more Royal Society of Chemistry author services and benefits here: https://www.rsc.org/journals-books-databases/about-journals/benefits-of-publishing-with-us/

Thank you for publishing with Environmental Science: Atmospheres, a journal published by the Royal Society of Chemistry – the world’s leading chemistry community, advancing excellence in the chemical sciences.

With best wishes,

Dr Claudia Mohr

Associate Editor, Environmental Science: Atmospheres

Reviewer 1

Accept as is