Title: Frequency of Human Papilomavirus and associated factors in gypsy and quilombola
women
Version: 6 Date: 23 Nov 2022
Reviewer's report:
After considering all the modifications presented by the authors, there were great improvements,
especially in the methods section. I recommend some corrections to be made as described below:
Abstract
# Page 2, Results section. The sentence “Descriptive analysis and Odds Ratio, with confidence
interval of 95%.” needs a verb. Probably to add “were performed” could solve this matter.
Background (Introduction)
This section was greatly improved. Some suggestions are presented:
# Page 3, paragraphs 3, 4, and 5 have the term “in Brazil” written 5 times. It is important to
review them to avoid repetitions.
# Information at paragraph 5 about the quilombola population are not correct. According
to Fundação Palmares (link: https://www.palmares.gov.br/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/tabela-
crq-completa-certificadas-22-08-2022.xlsx), the institute which is responsible in Brazil to
certificate the quilombola communities, there are actually 2,859 certified quilombola
communities, and 61% (1,744) are in the Northeast Region. The state with the largest number of
communities is Bahia (674), followed by Maranhão (597). The reference used in this paragraph
(number 9) does not refer to the quilombola communities, but to the gypsy ones.
# Page 4, line 77: it seems there is a mistake in the word ‘geoFigureical’.
Methods
The methods section was greatly improved. Authors described better the setting where the study
was conducted, as well as
I still have some concerns:
# Page 4 (last sentence) and 5 (paragraph 1). Regarding the sampling method, I was not able to
obtain the number of 145. What expected prevalence was used?
# Page 6, line 115: it seems there is a mistake in the word ‘sociodemoFigureic’.
# Page 6, lines 124-125: girls aged 13 to 17 years old were described as ‘it’. It is probably better
to write ‘they’. This paragraph needs a language review.
# Page 6 has 2 different periods of data collection: line 116 mentions March 16, 2021, as the
end of the period; line 132 mentions March 16, 2022. It is necessary to correct it.
# Lines 132 to 134 have 2 sentences that start with “The collection period was extended…”.
# Page 8: it seems there is a mistake in the words ‘sociodemoFigureic’ (line 162) and
‘demoFigureic’ (line 165).
# Page 6 (line 114) and page 8 (line 169) have different information about the number of
questions of the structured interview. Did it have 46 or 64 questions?
# Page 8, lines 174-175: I could not identify the triangulation technique mentioned for the
discussion of the results. This technique refers to the combination of quantitative and qualitative
methods, which were not used in this manuscript.
# For the approval of the Research Ethics Committee, it is recommended to mention the CAAE
number instead of the protocol, as it can be found easily in a search through Plataforma Brasil.
Results
This section was fully organized.
# I recommend adding a legend to the table 1 to explain the meaning of ACS-US, ACS-H, LSIL
and HSIL.
# I was not able to understand the difference of 12.5% between multiple and single infection
of figure 2 (page 9, line 199).
# Figure 3 is in Portuguese and it was attached twice to the submission page.
Discussion
The discussion was improved. Some minor concerns are presented bellow:
# Page 11, paragraph 1. This paragraph summarizes key results with reference to study
objectives, however I was not able to find the result about the women “living below the poverty
line”. How did the authors find this?
# It is necessary a review on the language. Line 235, for example, has “It are communities”.
There are several sentences written this way.
# As a suggestion, the authors could relocate the paragraph about the limitations to the end of
this section.
# Despite the stratified data about the ethnic group were taken off the results, they are still
discussed in this section, as we can see in lines 277-278, 282-283, 287-289. It is not possible to
discuss something that was not presented. Though, the discussion section needs to be reviewed.
# Page 14, lines 290-292: authors kept results from the older version. This paragraph should
be removed.
Conclusions
The first sentence of this section is not described in the results. The other contents are adequate
and supported by the data.