PONE-D-24-11256Assessing the impact of structural modifications in the construction of surveillance network for transboundary animal diseases: the role of backbone and sentinel nodesPLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The study “Assessing the impact of structural modifications in the construction of surveillance network for transboundary animal diseases: the role of backbone and sentinel nodes” set out to identify critical districts in which to institute surveillance activities among other control activities of TADs with a special focus on Peste des petits ruminants (PPR). The study used data from 10 market surveys in 3 states and employed a mix of standard social network analysis and mathematical modelling approaches to identify the most probable “sentinel districts” in Nigeria. The authors present a strong case in regard to the urgent need to effectively control PPR and eventually eradicated through activities such as building strong and efficient surveillance systems, a key contribution to the global efforts to eradicate PPR.

However, the manuscript in current state suffers a few serious methodological and minor scholarly considerations that the authors should consider attending to so as to achieve their set objective (s).

General comments

The authors conveniently define ‘sentinel nodes’ as those areas that are rapidly infected first in case of disease introduction, a definition that leans more to anatomy (cancer research). I would have thought that since the focus is control of TADs, a definition that is borrowed from epidemiology is more appropriate - sentinel nodes as to mimic sentinel monitoring or surveillance. These would be those districts intentionally identified to enable quick disease detection and patterns that guide more conclusive epidemiological investigations to determine spread mechanisms. For example districts that have a very high in-degree or high betweenness would be very good sentinels for disease surveillance because they simply receive animals from various origins that could potentially introduce disease.

Much as the authors apply robust techniques to identify the network backbone that has high potential for surveillance activities a much clearer approach for identifying sentinels for surveillance should have considered. For example, build the network and identify communities (if they exist) and each community selected districts with the highest selected centrality measure (s) – influential nodes and then those become sentinel nodes. Sentinel nodes would make much more sense if the authors then explored them over time (longitudinally) as cross-sectional view of the sentinels doesn’t tell a full picture. The authors need to explain more about their choice of approach to deal with missing/unreliable survey data especially inline with naural network structure of livestock mobility in Nigeria

In the epidemic simulation, the authors chose a “district” as the unit to be susceptible or “infected” and simulated the speed and breadth of PPR penetration across the different nodes. The authors need to elaborate more why they ignored other important epidemiological parameters that affect PPR transmission such as the small ruminant population density in each district, vaccination coverage, PPRV “spreadablity” (R0), animals that recover may not be “infectious” in the next cycle of infection etc. A suitable explanation needs to be included such that this study is more reliable.

Specific comments

The title needs to be revised to include PPR or Nigeria (or both). Or if the title will remain as is, the introduction section of the abstract needs to start off with more general literature about livestock mobility, sentinel nodes etc as PPR seems sneaked in the introductory paragraph of the abstract (given that it is not anywhere in the title).

Lines 6—10: Please crosscheck with the journal guidelines on author affiliation addresses otherwise in their current form they are abbreviated to the extent that one can hardly figure them out

Line 15: please rectify this ‘sweeping’ statement “....and is transmitted through livestock movements” because it not entirely true

Line 20: rework that sentence as it is difficult to comprehend

Line 42: a lot of general information is included here without supporting reference. For example, lack of storage facilities – the authors need to state what that means in an ambiguous manner, do you mean fridges/freezers, warehouses?

Line 47: please consider introducing the abbreviations in full and then only use them on subsequent mentions. For example, what does “WHOA” stand for? Additionally, thrught the entire manuscript, please write Peste des Petits Ruminants as sentence case (only capitalise the first letter), as it is just a name (noun) of a disease, so only the first letter should be capitalised

Line 49: high morbidity and mortality rates: mention some figures and give credit to the sources (as “high rates” does not communicate much)

Line 50: The PPR eradication strategy actually stresses vaccination as the main-stay control intervention. Consider adding a sentence to this paragraph to give non specialist readers more context about the eradication plan

Line 109: This is the first figure, but it labelled figure 8. The figure numbers need to be harmonised throughout the write up. And what state is represented by color grey? Please rework the figure legend

Line 111: please state clearly how many farmers exactly were interviewed per market and was this survey conducted in the same month, repeated observations or just one-off etc? Also consider replaced “were questioned” with “interviewed”

Line 114: “and to avoid problems related to the misspelling of village names” , the authors need to explain why they were unable to recruit local enumerators who could correctly spell the names of villages. Otherwise, this sounds like no one can correctly spell names of villages in Nigeria

Line 119: the authors need to include an explanation for their assumption of district susceptibility without considering vaccination coverage, animal population density, recovery from PPR confers protection (and animals may or may not be infectious to others etc). Why these assumptions were not included in the model needs to be explained

Line 141: more elaboration is needed on “non-observed links”, what are they and how can they be identified without necessarily observing them

Line 147: the sentence is vague. Consider re-writing it in a more concise manner

Line 151: how was ‘misinformation’ judged? What gold standard did the author use to determine that the responses from the survey contained “inaccurate information”. This needs to be made clear in the methodology. Again, state how many farmers (individual or groups of farmers) were interviewed as opposed to stating that “only some of the farmers” were interviewed

Random permutations do not seem to mimic natural small ruminant movement network structures. For example randomly re-ordering links may not necessarily mimic how naturally the “sources of animals eg rural areas” to “urban destination because that is where demand for livestock and their product is” – may not be a scenario one can just assume that the direction of flow can randomly be reversed. In my opinion, in addition to all the innovative approaches employed by the authors to correct for missing/misleading information:

The authors needed to use their market survey data and triangulate it with local key informants with subject specific knowledge to validate the reposes from the surveys. Additionally, the authors should have explored other mechanisms of data collection such as participatory mapping exercises with key stakeholders to reconstruct reliable and robust movement networks that are closer to the true picture in Nigeria (as has previously done by other researchers eg <https: 10.1038="" doi.org="" s41598-023-35968-x="">, <https: 10.1098="" doi.org="" rstb.2018.0264=""> ). Otherwise, the authors need to clearly state the epidemiological assumptions behind their choice of correction of missing data

Line 177: Once again it should be stated whether ‘frequency of infection’ takes care of the fact that infected animals in one epidemic may not be “infected again” as those animals will no longer be susceptible and thus move into the next class of “recovered”. It is not clear if such assumptions were considered in the simulation exercises. Additionally, for districts with not-large-enough populations of small ruminants, the epidemic will naturally die out once susceptible individuals are exhausted, and therefore I would expect some consideration of small ruminant density as a parameter. The authors need to provide an explanation or at least acknowledge that they are aware

Line 231: why did the authors expect the characteristics of nodes (locations eg districts) to change with increasing probability of infection? And also because some nodes were removed , edges re-wired in the different configurations, some changes were really expected even before the analysis. The question is; how do these configurations mimic the natural network structure of small ruminant movement in Nigeria (both static and dynamic)

Line 286: figure legend needs to be rewritten so as to clearly communicate what the fiure represents

Lines 354: The manuscript is silent about “Data analysis” section eg how the analyses were done, what software tools etc. In addition to the random forest plots, consider using the effect size and then explore visualizing the plots with interpretation of what metrics has the largest or smallest effect sizes (a suggestion)</https:></https:>

Reviewer #2: Excellent piece of research. - well described methods and results. Noting i am not a high level expert in network analysis this was helpful!

i would like to see some inclusion of the application in the discussion. Sentinel surveillance is cost-effective and if targeted appropriately contributes very relevant data to overall disease control Could tools be developed to make this sustainable for example?

I was not able to access a key reference - no.15 to ensure complementarity rather than duplication/permissible overlap.

Some minor suggestions/edits:

L31 45% 'of the' sentinel

L40 "pillar" .. Better 'essential' or similar wording

L45 "unify a region" unclear -

L37 WHOA --- WOAH

L51 "massively" - suggest 'extensively'

L60 data's to data

L68 "and circulating" not needed

L73 "of PPR" … `PPR virus'

L74 "line" to 'lineage

L77 'ad hoc' (italics)

L88 "and if so" - doesnt read well - delete or reformat sentence

L147 "tantamount" - paramount / supreme / substantial

L286 Fig 2 caption on different page to figure

L295 Fig 3 caption on different page to figure

L355 Gini

References

Ref 2 "bavf"?

Duplicate refs 30/31

Replace in english for "disponible sur.." and names of months

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Joseph Nkamwesiga

Reviewer #2: No

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Assessing the impact of structural modifications in the construction of surveillance network for Peste des petits ruminants disease in Nigeria: the role of backbone and sentinel nodes

PONE-D-24-11256R1

Dear Dr. MESDOUR,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

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Kind regards,

Martin Chtolongo Simuunza, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

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4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: No

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: I am generally satisfied with the responses to the queries I raised.

However, I believe that this manuscript would benefit from a dedicated "Conclusion" section summarising the takehome mesaage. The manuscript should still be revisited by the authors to rid it of some minor typographical errors that still exist in different sections.

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If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: Yes: Joseph Nkamwesiga

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