  We review the problem of the noise activated escape from a metastable state
in the presence of non-Gaussian noise, and present connections between various
theoretical approaches. We also respond to criticism of our work by Tom\'a\v{s}
Novotn\'y [arXiv:0807.0387] concerning the weak damping limit. The discrepancy
between our results is linked to uncontrolled approximations made by Novotn\'y.
