Letter to the editor : prioritisation of infectious diseases in public health : feedback on the prioritisation methodology, 15 July 2008 to 15 January 2009

To the editor: We read with great interest the results presented by Gilsdorf and Krause (2011) [1] of a survey to experts on the methodology used by Krause et al. (2008) [2] to prioritise 85 pathogens of public health importance. Their work deals with a very relevant subject, given current pressure on health budgets: the allocation of finite disease surveillance and control resources among competing alternatives, infectious diseases in this case. The authors correctly identify the evaluation as being multi-dimensional and compensatory. Unfortunately, they appear to have overlooked findings and principles of well-established methodologies for assessing the impact of multiple effects on non-tradable goods, such as multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) [5]. It is within this perspective that we make our comments. [...