Swine Disease Prioritization Matrix
A structured, transparent basis for deciding which pig diseases deserve research investment — built for the Swine Health Information Center (SHIC).
The problem this addresses is that "which disease matters most?" has no single answer. A disease can be cheap but ubiquitous, devastating but excludable, trivial for pigs but serious for people. Ranking them on any one of those axes gives the wrong answer. So instead every agent on the register is scored against the same eight criteria, and the relative weight of those criteria is set separately, by the people who have to live with the decision.
How it works
1 — A register of what is being compared. 158 assessment units: 79 viruses, 53 bacteria and 26 parasites. The unit is deliberately not an organism — it is one thing that gets one score and one brief, so a syndrome with several agents can be a single entry, and a sub-species agent that swine medicine treats as its own disease can be one too. Every entry is anchored to an external taxonomy so the names cannot quietly drift.
2 — Eight criteria, each with ranked levels. Level 1 is always the least-concern end. See Criteria & Levels for the full definitions, the level labels, and worked examples of each.
3 — Every agent scored against every criterion, with the evidence attached. Each score cites the passage it rests on, and records the reasoning from that passage to that level. All 158 have been assessed and signed off. Read them in the Disease Briefs.
4 — The criteria are then weighted, separately. Around 40–50 people answer pairwise trade-off questions in 1000minds, using the PAPRIKA method. They price the criteria against each other; they do not score diseases. Their answers, combined with the scores here, produce the ranking. This step is in progress.
The separation in step 4 is the point of the whole design. The evidence about each disease and the judgement about what matters are gathered independently, so neither can be quietly bent to produce a preferred answer.
Where to start
| If you are… | Start here |
|---|---|
| Reviewing the framework before the weighting survey | Criteria & Levels, or the printable Criteria Cheat Sheet |
| Looking up a particular agent | Disease Briefs — filter by name, or jump by letter |
| Asking what "assessment unit" or "level" means here | Definitions & Scope |
What a brief contains
Each of the 158 briefs opens with a plain-language overview — what the agent is, what it does to a pig, and why it is on the register — written to be read by someone who is not a swine veterinarian. Then, for each of the eight criteria: the level assigned, the quoted Basis it rests on, and, folded away, the working argument for why that level and not the one above or below.
Two conventions are worth knowing before you read one:
- A criterion marked NOT ASSESSED is a statement about the evidence, not about the agent. It means the folder for that entry holds nothing bearing on that question. It does not mean the risk is low. Thirteen entries carry at least one such criterion; a level is never invented to fill the gap, which is why those thirteen cannot go into the weighting software, since it accepts no empty cells.
- The reasoning is shown, not just the answer. Where a level was corrected during review, the brief says so and by whom.
Status
| Criteria | 8 criteria, 30 levels — settled after two rounds of expert review |
| Register | 158 assessment units — 79 viruses, 53 bacteria, 26 parasites |
| Scoring | Complete. All 158 assessed and signed off |
| Briefs | Published — all 158 |
| Weighting | In progress — 1000minds trade-off survey |
The framework was reduced from eleven criteria to ten, then to eight, across two rounds of expert review. Contribution to antimicrobial resistance and eradication feasibility were removed; the biosecurity criterion was replaced by one asking what effort is required to keep an agent out of a herd. Individual criteria have been refined since — most recently, zoonotic potential and zoonotic impact were separated so that the first asks only whether pigs are the source of a human infection, and the second grades only how severe that illness is, wherever it was caught. Every criterion considered and rejected is recorded, with the reason.