Factors Affecting the Perception and Practice of Iranian Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Pastoralists in Regard to Biosecurity Practices in Sheep and Goat Farms: A Cross-Sectional and Prospective Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for devoting your time to reviewing our paper and giving us your valuable feedback. The changes are made as you requested.

The only point is that in line 134, Fig 2 refers to annual mortality rate and Fig 3 refers to farmers' experiences, and they are correctly mentioned in the text.

Best regards,

Ali Jafari-Gh.

Reviewer 2 Report

I think this paper is potentially of great interest to the international livestock health community as it describes in detail biosecurity practices (or lack of them) in small ruminants in often remote farmers who are not well educated and whose practices are largely undocumented.

As the authors admit the study design is not ideal, and that is why I have scored some of the points above as 'can be improved' etc., but having said that it is a very pragmatic approach, the authors have been transparent about it and I believe they are correct in saying that nevertheless, these results are in all probability 'generalizable'.

There is a lot of detail in the tables and I wonder whether the data can be summarised in a more digestible way perhaps by Figures or just by summarising a bit further.

The Discussion is very long.  At first sight the farmer quotations would seem to be excessive, but on further reading they do appear to offer a lot of insight as to why farmers deal with diseased animals in the way that they do. So, on balance I am comfortable with the quotes unless the authors feel that they could be categorised / summarised / grouped together in order to be more succinct.

It is very noticeable that all the authors seem to be from veterinary / animal science faculties.  It seems to be increasingly fashionable, even a requirement by some donors, that the social sciences are brought into these kinds of studies to help throw more light on farmer-behavioural aspects. Some comment from the authors in relation to this would be helpful.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your valuable comments. We actually discussed the tables and the way they are presented, but respectfully decided to keep them as they are, as they fully describe the results of the analysis. I did try to do some edits though, so the reader can understand them better.

Regarding the research team, we generally agree that a social scientist can make a great contribution, but in this case we were simply documenting KAP rather than actively trying to change it (when a social scientist would be definitively required). Therefore, we did not see the need, especially as many of the authors are very familiar with the farming systems and the farmers' culture (being farmers themselves). It is worth mentioning that we did draw on the knowledge of KAP researchers on other areas (e.g. Prof. Ahmad Jafari Ghavamabad is a well-known KAP research in dentistry in the country).

Best regards,

Ali Jafari-Gh.

Reviewer 3 Report

General comments

This study aimed to report several practices, mainly in biosecurity  issue, of  nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoralism (Small ruminants). The association between mortality rate (MR) and biosecurity  management was also assessed. Despite the descriptive analysis The odds ratios for continuous variables in logistic regression was the main analysis used in the present work.

In my opinion, this is a nice study, but some issues should be elucidated or corrected before to accept it. The definition of MR should be well defined once we have farmers reporting with a very low rates (less then 2.5%) and the Quartil1. of the flocks was about 120 animals (only 3 animals dead in one year?). There are some difficulty to interpret the M&M. Figure 1 would be placed on this last section. The major issue is the interpretation of the significance OR (mainly the 95% CI). The authors consider P=0.6-.1 as an tendency. Its formally right, but using OR, the 95% CI should be accurately interpreted  (see specific comments).

I fully appreciated the discussion (even is a “general discussion”) mainly the insertion of the framers´ statements. It a “different” discussion.

In my opinion, a moderate revision is need to correct these issues.

Specific comments

L29-30: The MR is associated to some biosecurity pratices and it´s not the cause (“…affected…”)

L57, 59: Two consecutive sentences staring with however? Please revise the English presentation throughout the text.

L80: Adult or total animals?

L104 (Table 1). Please elucidate about the scoring protocol of the questions. Maybe using “… isolating sick animals…” instead of “…quarantining sick animals…” is more correct.

L115 (Table 2): the categorization in the regression analysis is important regarding  the odds ratios for continuous variables in logistic regression. So I think that you need to elucidate this point to the reader (the reader should interpret  what you min when you report the variation between two variables)

L132:    Quartil1=120. Note that your minimum farm size is 6 (in M&M). Now the mean was 308 animals. Apparently only a few farms had a relative low number of animals. Please elucidate this difference. The same for years of experience (L135).

L154-157: note: you have a tendency (“tended”) for a difference of 6.9% annual MR. Nevertheless the 95% CI varied from -0.6 to 15%. So, even if the mean was 6.9, we don’t known in the population if the use of washable materials is more likely to increase MR (can be or can be not), i.e. both the lower and upper 95% CI need be always less or more than 1. The 95%CI don’t determine the significance but determine the level of precision of the OR (see Szumilas M. (2010). Explaining odds ratios. Journal of the Canadian Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry = Journal de l'Academie canadienne de psychiatrie de l'enfant et de l'adolescent, 19(3), 227–229. For a quick interprétation. Your result is not significant. Please correct the sentences in whole the document when you state that the value increase or decrease.

L158: washed? You means “cleaned”? and what means cleaning the feed?

L163-167: These results were not specifically reported in tables. We don’t know the P value.

L171- The same.  In the 95% of population, dry and clean place decrease or increase the MR.

L168: 95%CI 0.8 to 14

L192: 95% CI -0.2 to 8.1%

L274-275: the “lack of understanding of the risks” was not evaluated and can be not associated with “poor farm practice “; maybe your results suggest this. But you need to elucidate what studied variable can justify this statement.

L328-329: Yes, but these sick animals keep at “house” at grazing time?

L480-481: I´m not entirely comfortable with this statement. In table 2, the authors consider that the socio-demographic factors coming from both human and animal populations. In fact this table mainly define this factors for categorization in the regression analysis. This sentence can means that, according to the farmers perception, if the MR was high, farmers takes more care. This can be true, but you only have a association, and according to the model the independent variables (i.e., biosecurity measures and others) are the “cause” of the MR.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for valuable comments. You can find the aswers ers in the attached file.

Regards,

Ali Jafari-Gh.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Reviewer 3 Report

tthe authors took into account the reviewer's comments, justifying the rebuttal of some of them.