PONE-D-26-17161

Perceptions and public health risks of the bat-human interface in households from fragmented rural landscapes in Southern Chile.

PLOS 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?

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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-->5. Review Comments to the Author

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Reviewer #1: In this manuscript, the authors examine rural residents' perceptions of bats, including perceived risks, across the three interfaces of humans, pets, and livestock. I enjoyed reading the manuscript, which in my opinion is well done. Below, I split my comments into major comments and minor comments.

MAJOR COMMENTS

1. The survey included a question asking people if they're vaccinated against rabies. I would have liked to see those responses summarized in the paper. Going a step further: it would be valuable to also show information on population rabies vaccination rates in the Los Ríos and Los Lagos regions. This could allow you to draw an interesting comparison of how the sample vaccination rates compare to the population vaccination rates.

2. You mention that people have a low perception of the actual risk of rabies transmission to humans in the country. But, I was left wondering, what is the actual risk of rabies transmission? Again, could you provide statistics for rabies rates in the populations of the two regions considered in the paper? This would help a reader conceptualize how big of a risk rabies actually is.

3. You mentioned that dwellings/structures in the immediate vicinity were visited. I'm wondering, was there any specific threshold distance beyond which you did not consider dwellings/structures as eligible? Also, was there a target or maximum number of dwellings/structures you targeted per each sampling point?

4. You have a sentence about excluding surveys if fewer than 75% of questions were answered or if critical missing information could not be resolved after three attempted contacts. Please provide readers with the specific number of surveys that fell into those categories and thus were omitted.

5. You settled on using three contact levels (low, medium, high). That makes sense, but it would be great if you provided readers a little more information on how exactly you settled on using these three levels, as well as what sorts of specific rates constitute things like "high frequency access" to bats.

6. The action category variable includes three groups: negative/aggressive, neutral/evasive, and precautionary/informative. However, I'm concerned that the breakdown may not be clean. For example, what if someone is the type of person that engages in preventative measures (thus falling into the precautionary/informative group), but then a bat makes its way into their house anyway, and then they react in a negative/aggressive way (thus also falling into the negative/aggressive category)? This would mean that the categories aren't mutually exclusive.

7. In Figure 1, given that you use color, I would recommend making water appear a light blue in the map.

8. You provide summary statistics for people with dogs and people with cats. I'm wondering whether it might be interesting to distinguish this a little more specifically: people with dogs only, people with cats only, and people with both dogs and cats.

9. In general, I thought the overall writing throughout the manuscript was of pretty high quality. However, there is a drop-off in the Discussion. In my minor comments below, I offer some suggestions for improvements.

MINOR COMMENTS

Line 45: Remove the "of"

Line 53: "Whitin" is misspelled

Line 92: Need a space between "information" and "[28]"

Line 99: Consider making "perception" plural

Line 131: The "a" should be an "and"

Line 135: Recommend clarifying that age refers to age of the dwelling. Also, recommend removing the "and" in this line given that there's an "and" before the last term of the list in line 136.

Line 161: "with three groups" would sound better than "into three groups" (especially because "into" was already used just a bit earlier in the sentence)

Line 168: Recommend this rephrasing: "… and construction older than 20 years."

Table 1: Recommend having the "Presence of Domestic Animals (N=69 households)" header go across the full width of the table rather than being contained just in the first column

Line 222: The comma in this line would be better as a colon

Table 2: Try to get the "Total Evaluated (N)" header to fit on one line

Line 227: You start this line with an incomplete sentence

Line 232: It's said that bat colonies "were found". This is written in passive voice and makes it unclear who was doing the finding. Was it residents? Or interviewers?

Line 258: Remove the "was"

Line 308: Remove the comma

Line 317: Change "bringing into" into "bringing bats into"

Lines 318-319: Need better parallel structure in this sentence. You say "pets can act […] drawing […] are recognized". Instead, consider: "pets can act […], drawing […] and serving as recognized intermediary hosts […]". Also, the "linking wildlife and humans" part might be better as "thereby linking wildlife and humans"

Line 327: No comma

Lines 330-332: Rewrite this sentence for clarity (sentence that starts with "In contrast, …")

Lines 337-341: Rewrite this sentence for clarity (sentence that starts with "Thus, rural…"). It gets convoluted towards the end.

Line 342: Use "disconnect" rather than "disconnection"

Line 343: Need a comma between "[20,21]" and "was observed"

Line 344: Make "bat" plural

Line 346: The "representing a public health gap" makes this sentence a bit overwhelming. Consider rewriting.

Lines 349-352: The subject of the sentence is "residents", and in the first part of the sentence you use "to recognize". However, later in the sentence you switch to "underestimating". Verb tense agreement would be better as "to underestimate". Consider rewriting this sentence along these lines.

Line 355: Instead of "…, dominated…", consider "…, which are instead dominated…"

Line 358: Needs to be "accounting for"

Line 359: You start this sentence with "further", after having started the prior sentence with "however", and the sentence before that with "thus". Words like these are often not necessary and can distract from the material.

Line 366-367: The "lacking consistent…" end part of this sentence becomes overwhelming. Consider splitting this into its own sentence.

Line 368: Remove the second comma

Line 369: Add a comma between "exposure" and "are"

Line 378: The "Making it difficult…" is an incomplete sentence

Line 536: Replace "applied to" with "administered to"

S1 Appendix: In the survey question table, I would recommend top-aligning the question numbers (rather than having them aligned in the middle as currently)

Reviewer #2: This manuscript addresses a relevant and under-described One Health and public health interface in rural southern Chile: the coexistence of synanthropic bats, humans, companion animals, and livestock in fragmented rural landscapes. Overall, the study is technically sound for a descriptive and exploratory cross-sectional design, and the data generally support the main conclusions. The survey instrument is consistent with the objectives of the study and includes relevant information on household characteristics, structural features, presence of pets and livestock, bat presence, guano in human and animal areas, observed bat–animal contact, control measures, reporting to authorities, rabies vaccination, and knowledge of bat-associated diseases.

The manuscript is potentially suitable for publication after minor revision. I provide the following comments to improve clarity, reproducibility, and interpretation.

1. Clarification of the derived contact-level variable

The ordinal “human-bat contact level” variable is central to the analysis and interpretation of the results. However, the manuscript should describe more explicitly how this variable was constructed from the questionnaire responses. I suggest adding a supplementary coding table indicating which specific answers were used to classify households as low, medium, or high contact. This would improve reproducibility and allow readers to better understand the analytical approach.

2. Clarification of the knowledge score

The health-risk knowledge score is useful as a simple descriptive indicator, but it should be presented as such. The score appears to capture whether respondents recognize potential disease transmission from bats to humans, pets, and livestock, but it does not necessarily measure depth, accuracy, or practical applicability of knowledge. The authors should clarify this limitation and avoid implying that the score is a validated measure of health-risk knowledge.

3. Interpretation of public health risk

The manuscript refers to “public health risks”, which is appropriate as a broad framing. However, the study does not directly measure pathogen presence, confirmed bite or scratch events, clinical disease, or quantitative infection risk. Therefore, some statements should be slightly moderated to emphasize that the study provides evidence of exposure opportunities, risk-related household conditions, and perceived risk, rather than direct measurement of pathogen transmission or disease risk.

4. Statistical analysis

The statistical approach is appropriate for the descriptive and exploratory nature of the study. The use of descriptive statistics, confidence intervals for proportions, Fisher’s exact test or chi-square tests with Monte Carlo simulation for small cell counts, and Spearman’s correlation is reasonable. However, the authors should consider presenting complete contingency tables and, where possible, effect-size estimates with confidence intervals, rather than relying mainly on p-values. The exploratory nature of the associations should also be clearly stated.

5. Data availability

The current Data Availability Statement indicates that the dataset is not publicly available due to privacy restrictions related to the exact location of rural dwellings and that data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. This does not fully meet the expectation that the data underlying the findings be made available without restriction, except under clearly justified ethical or legal constraints. I recommend that the authors deposit a de-identified dataset in a public repository, removing exact coordinates or replacing them with aggregated or anonymized spatial variables. If public sharing is not possible, the restrictions should be described in more detail, including the institutional procedure for requesting access.

6. Ethics statement

The study involved surveys with human participants. The ethics statement indicates approval by an Institutional Committee for the Care and Use of Animals in Research. The authors should clarify whether this committee had formal authority to review human-subject research involving surveys. If applicable, approval or exemption from an appropriate human research ethics committee should be reported.

7.Language and terminology

The manuscript is intelligible and written in generally understandable English. Nevertheless, it would benefit from some English language editing. Some expressions should be corrected or refined, for example “Emerging of infectious diseases” (should say emergence), “Whitin”, and “natural refugees”. The term “sanitary risk” should also be reconsidered in several places; depending on the context, “health risk”, “public health risk”, or “risk of exposure” may be more appropriate. Please also standardize terminology such as “Los Ríos”, “southern Chile”, “households”, “dwellings”, and “bat presence” throughout the manuscript.

Overall, this is a valuable descriptive contribution that provides relevant baseline evidence for understanding bat-human-domestic animal interfaces in rural southern Chile. After clarification of the derived variables, improvement of data availability, minor refinements in interpretation, and correction of figure and language issues, the manuscript would be suitable for publication.

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Reviewer #1: Yes:  Aaron J. Enriquez

Reviewer #2: No

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PONE-D-26-17161R1

Perceptions and public health risks of the bat-human interface in households from fragmented rural landscapes in southern Chile.

PLOS One

Dear Dr. Hernandez,

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, especially the minor and very minor comments of Reviewer 1.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 25 2026 11:59PM. 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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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Daniel Oladimeji Oluwayelu, D.V.M., M.Sc., Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS One

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If the reviewer comments include a recommendation to cite specific previously published works, please review and evaluate these publications to determine whether they are relevant and should be cited. There is no requirement to cite these works unless the editor has indicated otherwise.

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

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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: (No Response)

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

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

-->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: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

-->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: Job well done to the authors, who satisfactorily addressed all of my prior comments. I believe this manuscript is in great shape, and I have no more major comments. However, I have a few additional minor and very minor comments from this latest version of the manuscript and supplemental files. I will list those below, hopefully the authors find them helpful.

Minor comments

You use the term "exposure opportunities" a few times throughout the manuscript. Maybe it's just me, but I associate the word "opportunity" in somewhat of a positive light. Would recommend considering an alternative word instead.

Line 255: Prior to this paragraph of the Results section, you were typically listing fractions first, then percentages, but it swaps here. Also, sometimes you use a fraction for the numbers, whereas other times you use "n=". Recommend being consistent with all these types of things across the entire section.

I'm liking the additions to this Discussion section. However, currently, there is a very long block of text to end the section. Would recommend splitting out paragraphs here:

- Line 431: Make the "This lack of…" a new paragraph

- Line 447: Make the "Several limitations should…" a new paragraph

Very minor comments

Line 17: In footnote 7, wondering if "climático" should be capitalized.

Line 26: Appears that there could be more than one space between "health" and "risk"

Line 30: Would sound better as "with 67% of dwellings presenting"

Line 60: You use "refugees" here

Line 64: Consider hyphenating "highly urbanized"

Line 71: Would recommend replacing "coexists" with "coincides"

Lines: 76-77: The "although still is an" part reads unnaturally. Would suggest a rewrite.

Line 79: Here you use "Rios" instead of "Ríos"

Line 137: Would recommend moving the "(bat feces)" part right before the comma in the next line

Line 139: There may be an additional space between the comma and "use"?

Line 174: Consider hyphenating "mutually exclusive"

Line 180: Here, you use a greater than or equal to sign before 65 years. Elsewhere (e.g., line 134) you use just a greater than sign. Please pick one and be consistent throughout.

Line 182: Recommend no comma

Line 200: Consider using "bat" and "rodent" singular here, it may sound better

Line 205: "under the fact" is an odd term, recommend rewording

Line 221: Need a space between the period after the parentheses and "Surveyed"

Line 221: Add an "a" such that it reads "across a diverse range"

Table 2: The left column appears top-aligned while the subsequent columns appear middle- or bottom-aligned. Would recommend making them all have top-alignment.

Line 292: You mention "S3-S7 Table". Consider using "Tables S3-S7" instead. If so, please update this also in line 635 and within the corresponding supplement document.

Line 335: Remove the "s" from "domestic animals"

Line 340: "are all" may sound better

Line 360: add "bats" so that it's "bringing bats into"

Line 370: Rewrite (e.g., "In children, increased curiosity or lower perception of danger could…")

Line 373: In both this sentence and the one before it, you use "or" before the last term in your lists. Would recommend "and" instead.

Lines 374-375: Need commas around "which supports their role in facilitating bat entry"

Line 379: Here you use "Rios" instead of "Ríos"

Line 403: Becomes a little unclear in this sentence what the intended subject is, whether it's the rabies, the spillovers, or both. If it's both, should use "are" instead of "is"

Line 412: Use "disconnect" instead of "disconnection"

Line 470: Remove the unnecessary ""."

S1 Table document: would top-align the left-most column in the table to make the rows a little easier to follow.

S2 Table document: Would make the "Lowest", "Moderate", and "Highest" terms in parentheses (in column 2) be lower-case.

S2 Table document: In the final row and column of the table, are you missing an "OR" before the last sentence?

S3-S7 Table document: Some terms throughout this document seem randomly capitalized (e.g., "Dog presence", "Human-bat contact", "Vulnerable Population", etc.). Would recommend making them all lower-case.

Reviewer #2: The authors have satisfactorily addressed my main comments and have substantially improved the manuscript. In particular, the revised version provides a clearer description of the sampling approach, the construction of the ordinal contact-level variable, the exploratory nature of the statistical analyses, the interpretation of public health risk as exposure opportunities rather than direct measurement of pathogen transmission, and the ethical approval process for the household survey.

I recommend acceptance

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Reviewer #1: Yes:  Aaron J. Enriquez

Reviewer #2: No

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Perceptions and public health risks of the bat-human interface in households from fragmented rural landscapes in southern Chile.

PONE-D-26-17161R2

Dear Dr. Hernandez,

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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Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

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Reviewer #1: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Fantastic work by the authors! They did a great job addressing all comments satisfactorily. This will make a nice contribution to the literature.

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Reviewer #1: Yes:  Aaron J. Enriquez

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