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World Health Organization Methodology to Prioritize Emerging Infectious Diseases in Need of Research and Development.

ABSTRACT: The World Health Organization R&D Blueprint aims to accelerate the availability of medical technologies during epidemics by focusing on a list of prioritized emerging diseases for which medical countermeasures are insufficient or nonexistent. The prioritization process has 3 components: a Delphi process to narrow down a list of potential priority diseases, a multicriteria decision analysis to rank the short list of diseases, and a final Delphi round to arrive at a final list of 10 diseases. A group of international experts applied this process in January 2017, resulting in a list of 10 priority diseases. The robustness of the list was tested by performing a sensitivity analysis. The new process corrected major shortcomings in the pre-R&D Blueprint approach to disease prioritization and increased confidence in the results.

SUBMITTER: Mehand MS

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6106429 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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World Health Organization Methodology to Prioritize Emerging Infectious Diseases in Need of Research and Development.

Mehand Massinissa Si MS Millett Piers P Al-Shorbaji Farah F Roth Cathy C Kieny Marie Paule MP Murgue Bernadette B

Emerging infectious diseases 20180901 9

The World Health Organization R&D Blueprint aims to accelerate the availability of medical technologies during epidemics by focusing on a list of prioritized emerging diseases for which medical countermeasures are insufficient or nonexistent. The prioritization process has 3 components: a Delphi process to narrow down a list of potential priority diseases, a multicriteria decision analysis to rank the short list of diseases, and a final Delphi round to arrive at a final list of 10 diseases. A gr ...[more]

PMID: 30124424

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Project description:There is growing concern in Sub-Saharan Africa about the spread of the Ebola virus disease (EVD), formerly known as Ebola haemorrhagic fever, and the public health burden that it ensues. Since 1976, there have been 885,343 suspected and laboratory confirmed cases of EVD and the disease has claimed 2,512 cases and 932 fatality in West Africa. There are certain requirements that must be met when responding to EVD outbreaks and this process could incur certain challenges. For the purposes of this paper, five have been identified: (i) the deficiency in the development and implementation of surveillance response systems against Ebola and others infectious disease outbreaks in Africa; (ii) the lack of education and knowledge resulting in an EVD outbreak triggering panic, anxiety, psychosocial trauma, isolation and dignity impounding, stigmatisation, community ostracism and resistance to associated socio-ecological and public health consequences; (iii) limited financial resources, human technical capacity and weak community and national health system operational plans for prevention and control responses, practices and management; (iv) inadequate leadership and coordination; and (v) the lack of development of new strategies, tools and approaches, such as improved diagnostics and novel therapies including vaccines which can assist in preventing, controlling and containing Ebola outbreaks as well as the spread of the disease. Hence, there is an urgent need to develop and implement an active early warning alert and surveillance response system for outbreak response and control of emerging infectious diseases. Understanding the unending risks of transmission dynamics and resurgence is essential in implementing rapid effective response interventions tailored to specific local settings and contexts.Therefore, the following actions are recommended(i) national and regional inter-sectorial and trans-disciplinary surveillance response systems that include early warnings, as well as critical human resources development, must be quickly adopted by allied ministries and organisations in African countries in epidemic and pandemic responses; (ii) harnessing all stakeholders commitment and advocacy in sustained funding, collaboration, communication and networking including community participation to enhance a coordinated responses, as well as tracking and prompt case management to combat challenges; (iii) more research and development in new drug discovery and vaccines; and (iv) understanding the involvement of global health to promote the establishment of public health surveillance response systems with functions of early warning, as well as monitoring and evaluation in upholding research-action programmes and innovative interventions.

Project description:Increasing globalization and international trade contribute to rapid expansion of animal and human diseases. Hence, preparedness is warranted to prevent outbreaks of emerging and re-emerging diseases or detect outbreaks in an early stage. We developed a rapid risk assessment tool (RRAT) to inform risk managers on the incursion risk of multiple livestock diseases, about the main sources for incursion and the change of risk over time. RRAT was built as a relational database to link data on disease outbreaks worldwide, on introduction routes and on disease-specific parameters. The tool was parameterized to assess the incursion risk of 10 livestock diseases for the Netherlands by three introduction routes: legal trade in live animals, legal trade of animal products, and animal products illegally carried by air travelers. RRAT calculates a semi-quantitative risk score for the incursion risk of each disease, the results of which allow for prioritization. Results based on the years 2016-2018 indicated that the legal introduction routes had the highest incursion risk for bovine tuberculosis, whereas the illegal route posed the highest risk for classical swine fever. The overall incursion risk via the illegal route was lower than via the legal routes. The incursion risk of African swine fever increased over the period considered, whereas the risk of equine infectious anemia decreased. The variation in the incursion risk over time illustrates the need to update the risk estimates on a regular basis. RRAT has been designed such that the risk assessment can be automatically updated when new data becomes available. For diseases with high-risk scores, model results can be analyzed in more detail to see which countries and trade flows contribute most to the risk, the results of which can be used to design risk-based surveillance. RRAT thus provides a multitude of information to evaluate the incursion risk of livestock diseases at different levels of detail. To give risk managers access to all results of RRAT, an online visualization tool was built.

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World Health Organization Methodology to Prioritize Emerging Infectious Diseases in Need of Research and Development.

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World Health Organization Methodology to Prioritize Emerging Infectious Diseases in Need of Research and Development.

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