A.8. Bluetongue. Gubbins et al. [13] examined bluetongue virus, an insect-borne infectious disease of ruminants in Europe. They used the next-generation method to determine R 0 and then Latin Hypercube sampling and partial rank correlation coefficients to assess the effect of parameter variation. Median values for R 0 were 0.81 (cattle only), 0.73 (sheep only) and 0.55 (both cattle and sheep), implying that the disease should not persist. However, the corresponding maximum values were 18.77, 15.48, and 12.82, respectively, suggesting that variation in parameters can have an enormous impact on the outcome, including persistence of the disease. The most significant changes in the estimation of R 0 were due to the mosquito biting rate, the extrinsic vector incubation period, the vector mortality rate, the probability of transmission from host to vector, and the ratio of vectors to cattle and sheep.