Supplemetary information for risk analysis on releasing Wolbachia-infected Aedes aegypti mosquitoes into the environment

Full description

This is the supplementary information for two manuscripts associated with the risk analysis.

The Email_Elicitation_Template file shows the form sent out via email to experts to record their scores for each modelled scenario.

RA_Supp_Info is the supplementary information file associated with the manuscript titled “Risk associated with the release of Wolbachia-infected Aedes aegypti mosquitoes into the environment in an effort to control Dengue”

It contains"
1) a glossary of terms
2) definitions of nodes and states for each end point
3) the conditional probability tables for each child node
4) the full fault tree diagrams for the two end points

RA_Supp_Info_S2 is the supplementary information associated with the manuscript "Potential sources of uncertainty in conducting a risk analysis for the release of novel technologies into the environment".

It contains:
1) methodology for encoding expert distributions as Beta distributions & combining expert opinion
2) Enlarged figures from Table 1
Lineage: We used a risk assessment framework to identify risk and expert opinion to populate the models. The data was collected through a series of workshops and email consultation, where expert elicitation was conducted with technical and non-technical experts. To assess the risk associated with the proposed release, two risk end points (undesirable states of a system) were considered, 1) risk associated with achieving release within a nominated time period, referred to as ‘Don’t Achieve Release’, and 2) risk that the release of wA. aegypti would result in more harm, known as ‘Cause More Harm’.
Brainstorming at workshops and fault tree analysis were used to identify possible hazards and model their relationships. The fault tree groups informed the structure of the Bayesian networks (BNs). Likelihoods of events occurring were captured in the combination of hazards within the BN. Risk was calculated from the expert likelihood estimates populating the BNs and the consequence estimates elicited from experts.

The risk analysis was developed in four stages, with the uncertainty addressed at each stage.