Figure 1.
Questionnaire designed to collect expert opinion about infectious disease characteristics for disease prioritisation in Canada.
Left hand column: criteria; right hand columns: criteria attributes. Numbers next to tick boxes indicate the value assigned to each attribute in the spreadsheet tool.
Table 1.
Characteristics of pathogens that were selected for prioritisation testing.
Figure 2.
Spreadsheet tool to assess the risk of emergence or re-emergence of infectious diseases associated with climate change.
Figure 3.
Decision tree structure (showing some of the criteria) developed in the software M-MACBETH.
Branches of the decision tree with a light blue branch are criteria, those with a yellow branch are attributes within one criterion.
Figure 4.
Properties of criteria A4: “Current incidence of human disease in Canada”, showing the 6 different attributes.
Lower (blue) and upper (green) act as the scale's arbitrary values of 0 and 100 respectively.
Figure 5.
Matrix of attributes for criterion A4 indicating the difference between each attribute.
The difference in value of two attributes is either ‘positive’ (i.e. one is greater than the other e.g. >20 is greater than 1–20) or where there is ‘no’ difference in value between two attributes. In this case there is no difference between answers of ‘0’, ‘not applicable’ or ‘unknown’.
Figure 6.
M-MACBETH derived scores as they were allocated to criterion attributes in the matrix.
Figure 7.
Disease ranking calculated in the spreadsheet tool for nine diseases.
A: Criteria were weighted using a fixed mean value based on expert opinion (weighting method 1). The maximum score possible for any disease was 23.7. B: Criteria were weighted using a probability distribution representing the range of expert opinion (weighting method 2). Cumulative probability distribution shows the total score over 10,000 iterations for each disease. The maximum score of a disease was a mean of 23.5 (standard deviation ±2.37, 95th percentile = 27.2 after 10,000 iterations).
Table 2.
Ranking of nine diseases according to the two different weighting methods used in the spreadsheet tool and the MACBETH tool.
Table 3.
Top two ranked diseases per criteria group according to the spreadsheet and MACBETH tools.
Figure 8.
Disease ranking by criteria grouping calculated in the spreadsheet tool for nine diseases.
Criteria were weighted using a probability distribution representative of expert opinion. Cumulative probability distribution shows the score for each disease during 10,000 iterations. Legends show pathogen ranking.
Figure 9.
Total score compared to the ‘influence of climate’ score for each of nine diseases in the MACBETH tool.
West Nile virus was the highest ranking disease overall and the disease most likely to be influenced by climate.
Figure 10.
Difference profile of Lyme disease compared to Chagas disease.
Bars indicate the difference in the score of two diseases for each criterion. A score of 0 (i.e. no bar) indicates that the two diseases scored the same. A green bar indicates that Lyme scored higher than Chagas, while orange bars indicate that Chagas scored higher than Lyme.