PONE-D-20-21180

Seroprevalence of brucellosis in small ruminants and associated risk behaviours for humans in different husbandry systems in Mali

PLOS ONE

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Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewer #1: Partly

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Reviewer #1: No

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Reviewer #1: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Manuscript Number: PONE-D-20-21180

Title: “Seroprevalence of brucellosis in small ruminants and associated risk behaviours for humans in different husbandry systems in Mali”

I appreciate the efforts by the authors to address the role of small ruminant husbandry systems in maintaining and transmitting brucellosis in Mali. Brucellosis remain an important endemic zoonoses in many of the developing nations, where such epidemiological studies need to be carried out to reveal the true prevalence and risk factors for the disease. I have major concern with the presentation of the results in terms of possible risk factors without the calculation of the measures of association, which I have highlighted in comment number 4.

Comments:

1. Line 53-55: “Livestock in Mali is facing many health concerns and many diseases hinder the development of the production in the country among which brucellosis [3]”…. The sentence seems to be incomplete, rephrase it.

2. Line 56: “The species B. melitensis which is the most widespread in small ruminants seems to be the most pathogenic in humans”: Provide the reference for it.

3. Line 106: “In each locality (village, hamlet), six farms were chosen”: The rationale for choosing six farms need to be described.

4. Results: The major issue with results are that there is no calculation for measures of association, the authors depicted the results just in % seroprevalence for different parameters. The univariate and multivariate analysis of the possible risk factors need to be estimated to justify the objectives of the study in terms of risk factors.

5. Line 234: “Risk behaviors of brucellosis transmission identified among farmers”: The authors presented the frequency of the possible risk factors for brucellosis transmission on the basis of the responses to the questionnaire. There is also need to find the association with the farm level prevalence of brucellosis. The title is little misnomer, the authors didn’t study the transmission pathways of brucellosis and there is no supporting data for human brucellosis prevalence.

6. Line 247: “this is an up-to-date study conducted”: The sentence needs to be revised.

7. Line 249: We used two diagnostic “technics”: Spell check it.

8. Line 252: “Seroprevalence and risk behaviors will be the main points around which the discussion will be structured”.: Need to be revised.

9. Line 265-267: “He also argued that a high animal concentration in an area would favour animal infection. This was somewhat confirmed by our results.”: There is simply the mention of herd size and seroprevalence in Table 1, the association between these need to be estimated before arriving any conclusion.

10. Figure 2: In Segou, the bar chart needs to be revised to bring urban bar together with rest of the two

11. Figure 3: Brucellosis risk behaviors identified according to small ruminant’s husbandry systems: I don’t think that this figure provides any significant finding, it can be supplementary Table.

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Reviewer #1: No

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PONE-D-20-21180R1

Seroprevalence of brucellosis in small ruminants and related risk behaviours among humans in different husbandry systems in Mali

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Souleymane ,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

The manuscript needs minor revision in the form of spelling checks and typo errors. Please check it carefully and the re-submit.

Please submit your revised manuscript by 23 December 2020. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Jasbir Singh Bedi

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Seroprevalence of brucellosis in small ruminants and related risk behaviours among humans in different husbandry systems in Mali

PONE-D-20-21180R2

Dear Dr. Souleymane,

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Kind regards,

Jasbir Singh Bedi

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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