Reviewer's report
Title:The Health of Women in the Fire Service
Version: 1Date:14 August 2012
Reviewer: Jeff Burgess
Reviewer's report:
Major Essential Revisions
1. The aim of the manuscript is to address the health and safety concerns of
female firefighters. However the introduction discusses a much more diverse set
of issues and as a result is longer and less focused than is ideal. Much of this
information more appropriately belongs in the discussion, such as but not limited
to the discussion of women in the military.
2. Please let this reviewer know the page number in reference #2 that states that
over half of the metropolitan departments have no female firefighters. It may be
that no modification to the text is needed.
3. Please also let this reviewer know where in reference #4 to find the court
decision.
Minor Essential Revisions
Abstract
4. First paragraph please change “nearly all” to “many” as there are a large
number of studies that have included female firefighters.
5. Please write out the acronyms IAFC and CAGE the first time they are written.
6. Under methods, please list the total number of departments assessed.
Introduction
7. The mention of anectodal information should be removed from the manuscript
as it cannot be independently verified. This includes both the mention of high
injury rates from ill-fitting gear and the unpublished survey by iWomen.
8. Please clarify when the subject of a paragraph is all firefighters rather than
female fighters, such as in the paragraph mentioning the meta-analysis by
LeMasters and colleagues and the following paragraph.
9. Firefighter studies often do include women, so the last line of the paragraph
including references 16 and 20 should be changed from “generally” to “often” or
another suitable word.
10. The acronyms MOMRP and DWHRP should be written out the first time they
are used.
11. Again, this time in the last paragraph of the introduction, the authors cite their
own and one other study to support their statement that “(nearly) all” studies
have eliminated female firefighters from analysis. Since a number of examples to
the contrary can be found, the wording of this sentence needs to be modified.
Methods
12. Please clarify that the use of SRPA, BMI, age and gender to estimate
VO2max has been evaluated in the general population, not specifically in
firefighters, unless any of your references specifically evaluated firefighters.
Results
13. At the beginning of the General Physical Health paragraph please indicate
that you describing the results for career firefighters.
Conclusions
14. On page 16 please change “data turns” to “data turn” as the word “data” is
pleural.
Tables
15. Since the tables should stand alone, please define acronyms such as BMI,
WC, MET, CAGE and CES-D 10 in the footnote of the tables when appropriate.
Also, please define the terms used such as underweight, athletic, systolic
prehypertension, etc unless otherwise instructed by the journal editor or the
journal instructions to authors.
Discretionary Revisions
16. Generally it is not necessary to repeat specific values in the text that are
already given in the tables. Specifically, at the beginning of the results section
you list many averages and standard deviations in the text as well as the table,
so at your discretion please remove them from the text and leave them in the
table.
17. In the results paragraphs describing the blood pressure findings, it would be
helpful to be consistent with the order of presentation of diastolic and systolic
findings.
18. In the conclusion, it would be helpful for the reader if the authors compared
their findings to those of the Murphy et al., 1994 study.
Level of interest: An article of importance in its field
Quality of written English: Acceptable
Statistical review: No, the manuscript does not need to be seen by a
statistician.
Declaration of competing interests:
I declare I have no competing interests in relation to this paper.