Note to the referee:

We thank the referee for his/her critical assessment of our contribution. 
The mentioned grammatical mistakes have been corrected in the revised version of our article. 
After studying the existing literature, in particular arXiv:0710.0380 and references therein 
(notably reference [10] in that work), we finally decided not to include additional references 
in our work in spite of the recommendation made by the referee. We would like to justify this 
in the following: Although the work by G. Torrieri and collaborators is interesting and 
valuable, it does not have the amount of overlap with our work that would make its addition an 
improvement of our discussion. In fact, it would add more confusion to it and necessitate the 
inclusion of more references of non-equilibrium statistical approaches. While Torrieri's work 
is concerned with the study of fluctuations in particle multiplicity ratios and contrasts 
equilibrium to non-equilibrium models, we consider fluctuations in conserved charges of QCD 
(in line with efforts made in the lattice QCD community to determine freeze-out conditions) 
under the strict assumption that these fluctuations originate from an equilibrated source. 
A proper discussion of the differences (in order to avoid any confusion) is in our opinion, 
however, beyond the scope of our work.

On behalf of the authors,
MB