Next Article in Journal
Special Issue on Fracture and Fatigue Assessments of Structural Components
Next Article in Special Issue
Effects of Resonant Electromagnetic Fields on Biofilm Formation in Pseudomonas aeruginosa
Previous Article in Journal
SemKoRe: Improving Machine Maintenance in Industrial IoT with Semantic Knowledge Graphs
Previous Article in Special Issue
The Role of Water in the Effect of Weak Combined Magnetic Fields on Production of Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) by Neutrophils
 
 
Article
Peer-Review Record

Evaluating the Utility of UV Lamps to Mitigate the Spread of Pathogens in the ICU

Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(18), 6326; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10186326
by Andrew Gostine 1, David Gostine 2,*, Jack Short 3, Arjun Rustagi 4, Jennifer Cadnum 5, Curtis Donskey 5 and Tim Angelotti 3
Reviewer 1: Anonymous
Reviewer 2: Anonymous
Reviewer 3: Anonymous
Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(18), 6326; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10186326
Submission received: 22 July 2020 / Revised: 28 August 2020 / Accepted: 9 September 2020 / Published: 11 September 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Electromagnetic Radiation in Biology and Health)

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

An excellent and highly important piece of work with perfectly designd experimental approaches. Concerning the data presentations it might be useful, if aplicable to include SD or SE numbers along with the average values.

 

 

Author Response

  • Reviewer 1: “If applicable, include SD or SE numbers along with the average values.”
    • P-values are included where appropriate; there are no SD values to report in our work.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript entitled „Evaluating the Utility of UV Lamps to Mitigate the Spread 2 of Pathogens in the ICU” by Gostine A. et al. presents the widely known and expected results of the UV sterilization effect on microbe DNA. However, practical need to prove this type of hypothesis, this manuscript, in my opinion, deserves to be published. Additionally, setting up an experiment, taking measurements and their results interpretation was made in a high standard. Also the authors' use of advanced statistics with regard to confidential interval (CI), as well as well prepared and interesting discussion, additionally favor the manuscript evaluation.

Minor - explanation of abbreviations: ICU – especially in title and abstract, also CFU in the text.

Author Response

  • Reviewer 2: “Minor - explanation of abbreviations: ICU – especially in title and abstract, also CFU in the text.”
    • These abbreviations have been clearly explained

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper deals with UV-C devices utility, a mosaic virus DNA as tracer, using a proxy for pathogens, across an hospital ICU.

Willing to consider an original and honest effort of the authors, however, the work has critical issues and major concerns, requiring further improvements and a severe revision.

Nevertheless, here there are some corrections and hints, just to try to improve and resubmit it:

Line 16: This is dogmatic and conceptually wrong: “The more decontaminated surfaces in a hospital the greater immunity conferred to patients against the spread of infections”. Immunity is a very specific term, please verify. Please, consult a public health operator or an immunologist to have support in revising the manuscript from an epidemiological and public health point of view and to better clarify the meaning of immunity (and herd immunity) and modify the sentence appropriately.

Line 18: All acronyms should be expanded, e.g. ICU

Line 22: The author should revise the sentence and explain better.

Line 24-26: decide the format to report data in the text 1.2% 10.10% 1.20%

Line 29: “Herd Immunity” is not an adequate and appropriate keyword for this article.

Line 32-41: the paragraph is generic, and the references are not updated. Please revise the paragraph!

Line 42-44: The authors should update the list of references and include recent and updated papers on the topic of infections associated with hospital devices, reprocessing  and monitoring strategies (e.g. Valeriani et al. Am J Infect Control. 2018;46(2):159-164. doi:10.1016/j.ajic.2017.08.008; Smathers et al. Am J Infect Control. 2020;S0196-6553(20)30212-1. doi:10.1016/j.ajic.2020.04.008).

Line 47: CFU/key is not a known term. Please verify!

Line 50-55: The paragraph is confused. Please revise it! The association between herd immunity and aseptic strategies is not clear. define and explain.

Line 73-93: The design of study is not clear. Please explain better: the high-touch devices, adding a figure or flow chart to better explain the study design and the UV Angel team and the role of this team in the work.

Line 94-106: The authors should include references to support the choice of this virus as a proxy and explain the difference between two mosaic virus DNA markers. The authors should describe these viruses. and comment on ethical issues related to authorization from ethical committee and risks for environments, operators, exposed people.

Line 95: Pathogen transmission was performed using two genetically distinct mosaic virus DNA

markers” Transmission is a very specific term, please verify. Please, consult an epidemiologist, or a public health operator or microbiologist to have support in the revision of the manuscript and clarify the meaning of transmission and modify the sentence consequently and appropriately.

Line 119-120: Please explain this phase of study.

Line 121-132 and Table 1: the author should explain better the protocol and should add the total time of UV lights illumination during the experiment. Exposure and experimental conditions have to be clearly stated and allow understanding of the experiment and reproducibility, too.

 

All the experimental setting and description requires a major revision, including the limits section.

In the Conclusion, clarify 10.10% as in methods and results sections.

The English technical style needs major revisions.

Also the reference section should be revised, according to the guidelines of the journal.

Author Response

Thank you for consideration for publication in your special edition journal on "Electromagnetic Radiation in Biology and Health.” We believe our work fits squarely in line with the theme of this edition and would be honored to be included. We appreciate the feedback from the three reviewers. We were able to accommodate most of the feedback in our latest edition.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

The corrections indicated in the reply letter are not present in the received version (from sentences to references, from abstract to discussion), but only a few highlited sentences and the erasing of the word herd/immunity.

Please, verify the correspondence between the cover letter and the analytical list of corrections and the new version with the tracking.

Thank you

Back to TopTop