PONE-D-23-44053Analysis of the swine movement network in Mexico: A perspective for disease prevention and control.PLOS ONE

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Additional Editor Comments:

Thanks for your submission "Analysis of swine movement network in Mexico: A perspective for disease prevention and control" , please consider both of the reviewers comments and take action for a resubmission including the major changes requested.

Yours sincerelly,

Dr Jf Carod

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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: Yes

Reviewer #2: Partly

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

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: Yes

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4. 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: 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 article provides relevant information about the swine network in Mexico, which is important for national improvements of the sanitary system and general risk analysis. The article provides extensive network analysis. My general recommendation is to condense the scientific text to enhance readability and maintain focus.

Dear authors, please find below some recommendations based on the text provided, aimed at enhancing the quality of your hard work:

Line 57: Could you explain better this percentages? The pig population was counted based on the number of farms or number of pigs (could you include the numbers of the estimation), percentage of production refers also to metric tons of meat or number of slaughtered animals?

Line 110: Municipal is a third or fourth level political organization. Federal, State and Municipal? Could you explain this.

Line 143: Spanish original names could be italic, or a short English name followed by the Spanish on parenthesis.

Line 216: Please consider indicate that you used hubs and authorities score, just for general audience readers.

Line 223: What about the semi-technified and backyard?

Line 228-241: Could you merge these two paragraphs.

Line: 238: Could you rephrase for better readability, why 20?

Line 265: Could you include the percentage of reduction.

Line 264: According to Fig.1C, the movement from livestock fairs and fattening reduces between Jun, Jul, Ago any explanation for this reduction (On the discussion the reduction is explained around Mar-Apr).

Line 278: According to Fig. 1C the number of shipments per month to livestock fairs, are extremely low, considering the 600.000 movements, it shows that the clients of that fairs should be backyard producers without registering those movements, is that appreciation, correct? Could you comment about that?

Line 288 Fig. 2. Could you comment about the long-distance movements (e.g. Line Merida – Chihuahua or Hemosillo >2500 km).

Table 2: Please consider including on Swine populationb the density (pigs/farms per Km2) to have a direct density comparison between hotspots, also could you consider including the local Moran index on the text or on the table for the hotspots, it could be useful (I suppose that local index should be higher than global index).

Line 323: When superimposing Fig2 and SM1 seems that there are some movements close to the c3 and c4 hotspots, please consider looking further if they are related or just errors on the data as my previous comment about line 288.

Line 317-323: Please consider include a percentage to the 15,148 considering the reference of total movement in the hotspots, some are explained as numbers and other as percentages, that makes harder to read.

Line 333: Please consider explain what you refer when talking about similarities and discrepancies.

Line 338: Please consider indicate the total number of farms registered on the PGN. Do you consider that they are backyard farms?

Table 3: Euclidean distance: 95th percentile and maximum distances are quite high biological plausibility of terrestrial transport, consider checking the validity of those movements, or maybe they are aerial transport maybe for high valuable pigs.

Line 439: Please consider rephrasing the loops explanation.

Line 366: Please consider which was the first assumption and based on what analysis.

404: Please consider separating methods and results in this paragraph.

Line 420: Please consider rephasing this paragraph.

Line 425: Please consider explaining better why on the map there are NA. My understanding is that 11 communities were identified, the largest 6 are plotted on the map and the other 5 (weaker) are plotted as NA.

Line 428: Please consider providing a clearer explanation of “geographically clearly defined” when looking at the map (Fig. 5B) as the colours appear quite scattered, particularly the blue ones. Additionally, regarding the “correspondence” of hotspots to the communities: C4 corresponds to the “red” community, but one municipality is on the opposite northeast side of the country. C2 is divided between the “blue”, “green”, “yellow”, NA (hard to tell); C1 is within the blue community, with some NA as well. Maybe a count of the match could help or use “approximate” in reference to the hotspots.

Line 459: Please consider that this paragraph only addresses the industrial perspective, whereas backyard producers might find it easier to slaughter animals on-site. There is evidence of movements to and from markets and maintaining them for ~1o monthly movements seems economically inefficient (please consider include the number of those markets). It is possible that other users of those livestock fairs are not registering their movements, as indicated in 578. Perhaps it could be interesting to keep this as an open question in the discussion for further research projects.

Line 467: Please consider that movements to slaughterhouses are usually considered as “dead-ends” with respect to disease transmission. How the network without dead ends would look like for using in a disease transmission model?

Line 476: Please consider rephrasing this paragraph.

Line 551: Please consider resume this long paragraph.

Reviewer #2: The paper "Analysis of swine movement network in Mexico: A perspective for disease prevention and control" uses social network analysis (SNA) methods to investigate patterns in Mexico's officially recorded swine movement data. The authors provide the analysis results through plots and tables and discuss their implications. While this kind of analysis is not new, the authors claim this is an original application of SNA in Mexico's swine movement networks. Here is my feedback based on what I understood from reading the paper.

1. The analysis is presented at the municipality level (as nodes) and not the farm level. Hence, there are limitations in interpreting the results. These limitations should be clarified to the readers.

2. The author's estimate of about 95.9% being attributed to slaughterhouse movements could be misleading if it is just based on shipment counts rather than pig population. Heads in fattening shipments are almost four times more than slaughterhouse shipments. This should be clarified in the wording.

3. Some of the statements in the paper are too trivial. For example, statements such as "movements occur in the same areas where swine production is concentrated..." do not provide any interesting insight. The authors should limit these statements and make the write-up concise.

4. Lines 191-193: The authors use and report Euclidean distance to measure distances between municipalities/nodes. However, shipment distances computed from road networks will likely better fit this context.

5. The discussion section is too long, where the authors provide a lot of commentary, but for the reader, it is difficult to extract information that could be used in later studies. For example, what are the top 2 or 3 insights/findings that are novel contributions of this paper?

6. Lines 262-264: Grammar issues.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Alfredo Acosta

Reviewer #2: No

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Analysis of the swine movement network in Mexico: A perspective for disease prevention and control.

PONE-D-23-44053R1

Dear Dr. Rico-Chávez,

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.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Clement Adebajo Meseko, DVM, 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

Reviewer #2: 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

Reviewer #2: Yes

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: 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

Reviewer #2: 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: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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: The authors have addressed all the recommendations, resulting in a clearer manuscript. Although the number of pages has not been reduced for conciseness, I consider the manuscript sufficiently clear and recommend it for publication.

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

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: Alfredo Acosta

Reviewer #2: No

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