Title: Prevalence of bacterial uropathogens and their antimicrobial susceptibility patterns among
pregnant women in Eastern Ethiopia: Hospital-based cross-sectional study.
Version: 1 Date: 19 May 2021
Reviewer's report:
This is about a manuscript entitled Prevalence of bacterial uropathogens, their antimicrobial
susceptibility pattern, and associated risk factors for UTI among pregnant women in Eastern
Ethiopia: Hospital-based cross-sectional study
General comments
1. The MS is in landscape orientation
2. Expand all abbreviation in the first encounter
3. English needs revision
4. Use the scientific way of writing for all bacteria.
5. The way you described the AST result may not be appropriate example ‘high level of
sensitivity’ there is no criteria to say ‘high level of sensitivity’ instead you may use x% of x
bacteria are susceptible to x antibiotic. Revise
6. Use ‘study participants’ instead of ‘study subjects’
Specific comments
Abstract
1. Methods: it lacks required information
2. Result: the way you described AST result needs revision as mentioned above
3. Conclusion: I don’t think your study is powered enough to conclude UTI as a serious public
health problem in pregnancy
Background
Methods (this section is not clearly written it lacks consistency)
1. Second paragraphs, second line: omit ‘GC’
2. Sample size determination: why do you use incidence instead of prevalence to compute the
sample size
3. Data collection procedure: did you develop the questionnaire yourself?
4. In Data collection procedure, line 4 ‘Culture and sensitivity results were also endorsed in
questionnaire’ what do you mean by it?
5. Laboratory investigation, sample collection: what do you mean by contaminated? Have you
refrigerated all urine specimen and why? Was there a difficulty in processing all urine specimen
immediately? How long did you store in the refrigerator?
6. Sample processing…: ‘Bacterial isolation and identification included macroscopic and
biochemical testing’ it is difficult to reach to the identity of bacteria using a macroscopic method
7. What do you mean by ‘under completely aerobic condition?
8. Did you calibrate the amount of urine to be inoculated? This is very important to define UTI
9. Instead of ‘a sterile loop’ cotton swab should have been used to inoculate on Muller Hinton
agar for AST
10. Methods used to the control quality of questionnaires and lab work are not included.
11. Operational definition: MDR definition contradicts the one presented under ‘AST’
12. Line 131: Figure 2 is not included; line 152 Figure 1 is not included.
Results
1. Under socio-demography mention the response rate.
2. Table 1: what is your basis to classify the age group in the way you did?
3. Omit mean age from table 1
4. Table 1: The total numbers of participants are 202 which is different from 200, check and
revise
5. Table 1: use no formal education in place of ‘illiterate’
6. Merge tables 2 and 6.
7. The way you calculated the proportion in table 6 is not correct…it needs revision
8. Table 3: ‘0’ makes the table busy
9. Merge Tables 3 and 4
10. The value presented under the overall susceptibility pattern is not mentioned in tables.
11. Table 5: include what R1, R2, R3…..R7 represents (antibiotics). Also, add a column for the
total MDR.
12. In Table 5: stick to the definition of MDR you mentioned and omit columns R0, R1, and R2.
Because they don’t represent MDR according to your definition.
Discussion
1. The first paragraph is not needed.
2. The prevalence of UTI among symptomatic pregnant women mentioned in the discussion is
different from the one mentioned in the result section.