Imperial College London
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ProfessorKrisMurray

Faculty of Medicine, School of Public Health

Honorary Senior Lecturer
 
 
 
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Contact

 

kris.murray

 
 
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Location

 

Norfolk PlaceSt Mary's Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Lachish:2018:10.3389/fvets.2018.00090,
author = {Lachish, S and Murray, KA},
doi = {10.3389/fvets.2018.00090},
journal = {Frontiers in Veterinary Science},
title = {The certainty of uncertainty: potential sources of bias and imprecision in disease ecology studies},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2018.00090},
volume = {5},
year = {2018}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Wildlife diseases have important implications for wildlife and human health, the preservation of biodiversity and the resilience ofecosystems. However, understanding disease dynamics and the impacts of pathogens in wild populations is challenging becausethese complex systems can rarely, if ever, be observed without error. Uncertainty in disease ecology studies is commonly definedin terms of either heterogeneity in detectability (due to variation in the probability of encountering, capturing, or detectingindividuals in their natural habitat) or uncertainty in disease state assignment (due to misclassification errors or incompleteinformation). In reality, however, uncertainty in disease ecology studies extends beyond these components of observation errorand can arise from multiple varied processes, each of which can lead to bias and a lack of precision in parameter estimates. Here,we present an inventory of the sources of potential uncertainty in studies that attempt to quantify disease-relevant parametersfrom wild populations (e.g. prevalence, incidence, transmission rates, force of infection, risk of infection, persistence times, anddisease-induced impacts). We show that uncertainty can arise via processes pertaining to aspects of the disease system, the studydesign, the methods used to study the system, and the state of knowledge of the system, and that uncertainties generated via oneprocess can propagate through to others because of interactions between the numerous biological, methodological andenvironmental factors at play. We show that many of these sources of uncertainty may not be immediately apparent toresearchers (for example, unidentified crypticity among vectors, hosts or pathogens, a mismatch between the temporal scale ofsampling and disease dynamics, demographic or social misclassification), and thus have received comparatively little considerationin the literature to date. Finally, we discuss the type of bias or imprecision introduced by these varied s
AU  - Lachish,S
AU  - Murray,KA
DO  - 10.3389/fvets.2018.00090
PY  - 2018///
SN  - 2297-1769
TI  - The certainty of uncertainty: potential sources of bias and imprecision in disease ecology studies
T2  - Frontiers in Veterinary Science
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2018.00090
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/59048
VL  - 5
ER  -
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