During the past decade, livestock diseases have (re-)emerged in areas where they had been previously eradicated or never been recorded before Drivers (i e factors of (re-)emergence) have been identified Livestock diseases spread irrespective of borders, and therefore, reliable methods are required to help decision-makers to identify potential threats and try stopping their (re-)emergence Ranking methods and multicriteria approaches are cost-effective tools for such purpose and were applied to prioritize a list of selected diseases (N = 29 including 6 zoonoses) based on the opinion of 62 experts in accordance with 50 drivers-related criteria Diseases appearing in the upper ranking were porcine epidemic diarrhoea, foot-and-mouth disease, low pathogenic avian influenza, African horse sickness and highly pathogenic avian influenza The tool proposed uses a multicriteria decision analysis approach to prioritize pathogens according to drivers and can be applied to other countries or diseases Copyright © 2019 Blackwell Verlag GmbH
Prioritization of livestock transboundary diseases in Belgium using a multicriteria decision analysis tool based on drivers of emergence