Dear Dr Hofman,
Thank you for your email of 23 August informing us that our paper is accepted but needing some corrections. We have made the corrections and responded to the suggestions below:
Reviewer #1: The present article in its revised version is much better. However, I still have a few remarks
Trichomonas vaginalis is improperly written in the abstract and the table 2. It is Trichomonas and not Trichomonis !!!!!!
These changes have been made and we apologise for the typo.
Abstract :
-I would suggest to erase the following part of the sentence on lines 7 and 8 : « 14.8% (95%CI 12.9-16.9) had =1 bacterial / protozoal STI and 10.3% (95%CI 8.1-11.9) viral STI ».
-95%CI is not written in front of the intervals on lines 9-10.
These changes/deletions have been made.
Because Genital warts are also due to HPV (even if non-oncogenic types) they should be included in HPV-related lesions. This should be specified in the materials and methods section and the results should be presented according to this modification, specially in Table 2. Title of table 4 should be corrected according to that modification.
These changes/deletions have been made as requested.
In the materials and methods section, authors report differences in some centers in the way they screened for STI. Since half of cases were recruited from Ukranian centers, such centers could be designed precisely. For example, in line 21, which center used its own guidelines ?
We have added the centre using its own guidelines. However, we do not feel that it is appropriate to state the specific centres in the rest of this paragraph as no results are stratified by individual centre (although of course we stratify by the Ukraine vs Western Europe centres, which is the current level of information provided in the methods). However, the final decision rests with you, of course.
Results, page 10, the two sentences about the overall prevalence of bacterial or viral STI should appear earlier in the text, just after the first sentence of the same paragraph.
We have moved these sentences.
Only the p values could be reported. Values of the chi-square test do not add anything to the results and could be removed.
We have removed the chi square values.
We hope that you are happy with these changes and look forward to hearing from you soon.
Best wishes,
Dr Claire Thorne and Dr Megan Landes