Assessment of Environmental Radioactivity Levels and Their Health Implications: Systematic Review
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Environmental radioactivity contributes to population radiation exposure and originates from both natural and man-made sources. Understanding these levels and their health implications is critical for public health, environmental protection, and radiation safety policies. This work systematically reviews published evidence on environmental radioactivity levels across various environmental media and to evaluate associated health implications, including estimated radiation doses and reported health outcomes. PRISMA guidelines were followed in this review. Databases including PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Embase, and Google Scholar were screened for studies published between 2000 and 2025 quantifying environmental radioactivity in air, soil, water, food, or building materials and/or estimating human health risks or radiation doses were eligible studies. Study characteristics, measurement methods, radionuclides, dose estimates, and health outcomes were extracted. Used adapted Newcastle–Ottawa and exposure-assessment appraisal tools to assess bias. Due to heterogeneity, findings were narratively synthesised. Studies consistently found 238U, 232Th, 40K, 226Ra, 222Rn, and 137Cs in environmental media. Mining and granite-rich regions had elevated concentrations, but most regions were within global averages. In most studies, dose estimates were below the 1 mSv/yr public exposure limit, except in high natural background radiation areas and radon-prone homes. Long-term stochastic effects from ingestion pathways and lung cancer risk from radon exposure were the main health concerns. Regional radioactivity levels vary but are generally within international safety limits, with localised hotspots. Public exposure and health risk are most caused by radon. Radon mitigation, monitoring, and education are advised.
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.
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 | 0.008 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it