Prioritisation of infectious diseases from a public health perspective: a multi-criteria decision analysis study, France, 2024

BackgroundWithin the International Health Regulations framework, the French High Council for Public Health was mandated in 2022 by health authorities to establish a list of priority infectious diseases for public health, surveillance and research in mainland and overseas France.AimOur objective was to establish this list.MethodsA multi-criteria decision analysis was used, as recommended by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. A list of 95 entities (infectious diseases or groups of these, including the World Health Organization (WHO)-labelled 'Disease X') was established by 17 infectious disease experts. Ten criteria were defined to score entities: incidence rate, case fatality rate, potential for emergence and spread, impact on the individual, on society, on socially vulnerable groups, on the healthcare system, and need for new preventive tools, new curative therapies, and surveillance. Each criterion was assigned a relative weight by 77 multidisciplinary experts. For each entity, 98 physicians from various specialties rated each criterion against the entity, using a four-class Likert-type scale; the ratings were converted into numeric values with a nonlinear scale and respectively weighted to calculate the entity score.ResultsFifteen entities were ranked as high-priorities, including Disease X and 14 known pathologies (e.g. haemorrhagic fevers, various respiratory viral infections, arboviral infections, multidrug-resistant bacterial infections, invasive meningococcal and pneumococcal diseases, prion diseases, rabies, and tuberculosis).ConclusionThe priority entities agreed with those of the WHO in 2023; almost all were currently covered by the French surveillance and alert system. Repeating this analysis periodically would keep the list updated.