Comments from reviewers and replies: 2013-03-28
We thank the reviewers for taking the time to review our revised manuscript and are
pleased that in general it was found to address the comments and suggestions from
the initial review. We have addressed the latest comments and suggestions as
detailed below and, in particular, have thoroughly checked and revised the language
and expression in the manuscript where necessary.
Reviewer 1: Janneke Heijne
I have a couple of minor suggestion for change:
1. In response to my “major compulsory revision point 1”, the authors have added a new and
clear section to the technical appendix. However, the discussion about this point in the main
text (last paragraph page 14, first paragraph page 15) is difficult to follow. More specific, the
sentence “Also, when compared … 30 years old [11]” is difficult to understand without the
context provided in the technical appendix. Furthermore, the sentence “we have
investigated … at observed levels” is too long and unclear to me. Please, change this part of
the discussion
Upon revision, we found the last submitted manuscript did contain some confusing
expressions, partly due, as the second reviewer suggests, to some left over editing
and tracked changes across different versions. These have been revised and
corrected. The discussion section, in particular, has been reorganised, including
separating model limitations into separate paragraphs (page 15), in order to express
some of the points more clearly.
2. Since the technical appendix has increased in length, it might be worth to refer to the
specific parts/figures of the technical appendix in the main text, and not just “Technical
Appendix”.
References to the Technical Appendix on page 6 and page 15 now also refer to
specific the sub-section within the Technical Appendix.
3. The reason for changing the frequency of condom use while being symptomatically
infected (major compulsory revision point 3) is now explained in the technical appendix. I
would like to see this in the main text.
The paragraph related to frequency of condom use has been moved from the
Technical Appendix to page 8 of the main text.
Reviewer 2: Boris Valentijn Schmid
Discretionary revision 1.
I would suggest a discretionary revision for the section "technical appendix, spread of
infections across locations". The concentration of infection at the more populous location in
the model could in theory also be due to a third factor (and the authors could test this): that
due to stochasticity the infection more easily goes extinct locally (whilst persisting globally) in
one of the smaller settlements than in the larger one. This would lower the average STI
prevalence in the smaller settlements. Having said this, it is indeed somewhat outside the
scope of this paper to exhaustively look at the spatial behaviour of the model, so the authors
need not to address this point.
While we agree that these suggestions are interesting and worthy of further
investigations, we also agree that such investigations lie beyond the scope of this
manuscript. Given that sexual behaviour and mobility patterns for mobile individuals
in the model are highly simplified due to insufficient data, it is likely that the results of
such analysis could not be directly related to the remote Indigenous communities of
Australia. We will certainly consider extending our work in future to address these
questions when more detailed data becomes available but have decided not to
conduct an extensive spatial analysis for this manuscript.
Minor essential/discretionary revision (I would leave it up to the editor to decide if this is
essential or discretionary)
Although in general the spelling of words in the article is good, there are some traces of
sentence-editing left in the article, in the forms of left-over words (such as "in of one of the")
in sentences. Furthermore, the grammar of many sentences could be improved, and the
word "the" is frequently missing from sentences. However, at its current level not a limitation
in understanding the article.
As stated above in response to Comment 1 of Reviewer, we have thoroughly checked and
revised the manuscript to ensure language, grammar and expression are acceptable and all
traces of editing and tracked changes have been removed.
Also, from copyediting,
Copyediting:
After reading through your manuscript, we feel that the quality of written English needs to be
improved before the manuscript can be considered further.
We advise you to seek the assistance of a fluent English speaking colleague, or to have a
professional editing service correct your language. Please ensure that particular attention is
paid to the abstract.
The manuscript has been thoroughly revised with the assistance of a fluent English
speaking colleague.