Risk ranking tools to prioritize the impact of exotic animal diseases in a country or area are useful to assist risk managers in optimizing the allocation of available resources for the prevention and control of infectious diseases. Although several such tools have already been developed, few focus on the probability of entry of an exotic pathogen into a territory and even fewer are able to rank multiple pathogens at the same time. We developed a semi-quantitative multi-criteria model to estimate the probability of incursion of an exotic pathogen into a European country and use Italy as a case study. We consider the import of 37 animal diseases of importance to Italy, based on OIE notification guidelines, and determine a disease status around the world based on current country-level reporting to the OIE. We identify seven possible pathways for the introduction of a pathogen and for each of them we determine a scoring system to assess for each disease the probability of introduction via each pathway. These scores, alongside the disease status, are used to calculate an overall risk score for each pathogen. The results indicate that the risk of incursion of Echinococcus multilocularis, African swine fever virus, Trichinella spp., lumpy skin disease and foot and mouth disease virus are ranked the highest. Additional analyses identified that the disease ranking is sensitive to the relative importance of the pathways of entry and also the impact of potential mitigation measures. The model is designed to be periodically updated with new data as they become available, e.g. global disease prevalence and trade volume. Therefore, it can be used by official authorities on a regular basis to obtain up-to-date results and consequentially strengthen surveillance towards those pathogens with the highest probability of entry.

优先考虑外来动物疾病在一个国家或地区的影响的风险排名工具有助于帮助风险管理人员优化可用资源的分配，以预防和控制传染病。尽管已经开发了几种这样的工具，但很少有人关注外来病原体进入领土的可能性，能够同时对多种病原体进行排名的就更少了。我们开发了一个半定量多标准模型来估计外来病原体入侵欧洲国家的概率，并以意大利为例。我们根据 OIE 通知指南考虑进口对意大利重要的 37 种动物疾病，并根据当前向 OIE 报告的国家级报告确定世界各地的疾病状况。我们确定了引入病原体的七种可能途径，并为每种途径确定了一个评分系统，以评估每种疾病通过每种途径引入的可能性。这些评分与疾病状态一起用于计算每种病原体的总体风险评分。结果表明，入侵的风险多房棘球绦虫、非洲猪瘟病毒、旋毛虫、块状皮肤病和口蹄疫病毒排名最高。其他分析表明，疾病排名对进入途径的相对重要性以及潜在缓解措施的影响很敏感。该模型旨在在新数据可用时定期更新，例如全球疾病流行率和贸易量。因此，官方当局可以定期使用它来获取最新结果，从而加强对那些最有可能进入的病原体的监测。