Multidisciplinary and Evidence-based Method for Prioritizing Diseases of Food-producing Animals and Zoonoses

Abstract

To prioritize 100 animal diseases and zoonoses in Europe, we used a multicriteria decision-making procedure based on opinions of experts and evidence-based data. Forty international experts performed intracategory and intercategory weighting of 57 prioritization criteria. Two methods (deterministic with mean of each weight and probabilistic with distribution functions of weights by using Monte Carlo simulation) were used to calculate a score for each disease. Consecutive ranking was established. Few differences were observed between each method. Compared with previous prioritization methods, our procedure is evidence based, includes a range of fields and criteria while considering uncertainty, and will be useful for analyzing diseases that affect public health.

Identification of diverse Salmonella Serotypes, Virulotypes, and Antimicrobial Resistance Phenotypes in Waterfowl From Chile

“…T he list of foodborne zoonotic pathogens includes numerous biological agents that have been ranked according to criteria related to public health, animal health, and occurrence in food (Cardoen et al 2009, Humblet et al 2012. Among them, Salmonella enterica is a pathogen that causes great concern in developed and developing countries, generating periodic outbreaks that result in endemic infection in humans (Cardoen et al 2009).…”

Diseases of livestock in the Pacific Islands region: Setting priorities for food animal biosecurity

“…Transparent and documented disease prioritization processes have now been quite widely conducted across the world, mostly in Europe (Balabanova et al, 2011;Gilsdorf and Krause, 2011;Havelaar et al, 2010;Humblet et al, 2012;McAnulty et al, 2003;Simoes et al, 2012), but also in Africa (Uzochukwu et al, 2007), in the Middle East (Gibson, 2011), and more recently in North America Sargeant, 2012a, b, 2013). It appears that only a limited number of prioritization exercises have been implemented for animal diseases globally (Humblet et al, 2012;McKenzie et al, 2007;Phylum, 2009;Van der Fels-Klerx et al, 2002).…”

“…It appears that only a limited number of prioritization exercises have been implemented for animal diseases globally (Humblet et al, 2012;McKenzie et al, 2007;Phylum, 2009;Van der Fels-Klerx et al, 2002). In the Pacific Islands region, a semi-quantitative prioritization process has been conducted by the public health sector of the Federate States of Micronesia for a revised selection of diseases to include in the National Notifiable Diseases List (Pavlin et al, 2010).…”

Critical review of methodology and application of risk ranking for prioritisation of food and feed related issues, on the basis of the size of anticipated health impact

“…The majority of the identified studies concerned the elicitation of some type of scoring, or elicitation of rankings. For example scoring of modules of a model that can be found in (Guillier et al, 2013;Humblet et al, 2012;Ruzante et al, 2010), or scoring of a number of criteria in the multi criteria model, as presented by (Anderson et al, 2011;Cardoen et al, 2009;Havelaar et al, 2010;Lake et al, 2010).…”

“…MCDA uses criteria such as epidemiology, prevention/control, effects on economy/trade, zoonotic characteristics, and societal effects. Expert elicitation is used to weigh the various criteria (Humblet et al, 2012) or provide the necessary information (i.e. strict preferences) from which weights of the criteria can be inferred (Neslo, 2011).…”