Badgers and TB

[watervole]

Here's the short version:

"widespread and repeated culling of badgers -- yielded both a reduction of 19% in TB incidence in cattle within the culled area and an increase of 29% in TB incidence in cattle in the surrounding area".

In other words you make it better for some farmers at the expense of others.

However, "The Badger Trust conservation group wants the government to shift the focus towards preventing the spread of TB among cattle by improving diagnosis and testing. Its spokesman Trevor Lawson says that since Northern Ireland introduced such measures in November 2004, rates of TB there have fallen by 40 per cent."

In other words, you can cut TB rates by twice the amount you get by culling, without killing a single badger.

For the full article in New Scientist, go here http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/mg18825303.400

Comments

[johnrw.livejournal.com]

In other words, you can cut TB rates by twice the amount you get by culling, without killing a single badger.

And that's supposed to surprise us how? The Ministry of Agriculture and it's successor DEFRA has never been known for rational measures.

The local vets, favour immunisation of the badger population, it wouldn't be too hard, just follow a similar process to the one the Swiss have successfully followed for thirty years to keep rabies out of Switzerland, and the French are using to roll rabies back to the German border

Take the Foot and Mouth Epidemic/farce of a few years ago. the Massive spread was due to various factors chief of which was the fact that in the thirty years since the last major outbreak the mileage cattle travel from farm to abattoir, caused by the closure of family and independent slaughter houses. The fact that instead of traveling a few miles either directly from the farm or by a local market the vast majority of cattle pass through an average of three to four markets via the hands of commercial middlemen aggregating sufficient cattle to feed the voracious appetite of the industrial abattoirs which in turn feed the supermarket chains.

This means that since markets also sell store cattle (half grown, will be fattened up to killing weight) and Calves anf weanlings (from Dairy farms to farms which grow them either to store or through to mature killing weight) that one infected animal can potentially infect several thousand animals at three foci of infection separated by several hundred miles.

The plans to contain a F & M outbreak were based upon the economics of the mid sixties when it was possible to contain the disaster to a single county (Cheshire) where a quarter of a million cattle were slaughtered to contain and eradicate the disease.

This time around they came up with the insane notion that they ought to transport all carcases in 'sealed' (hah a tarp over the top with bloody liquid dribbling out behind as it drives down the road does NOT count as sealed) wagons to central burn/burial sites is hardly the best method of limiting spread.

I live on a small beef farm which survived both the 1960's and the 2001 outbreaks by luck, geographic features which limited our contact/contamination opportunities and ruthless biosecurity (lovely word for self enforced quarantine). Nothing got onto the farm without disinfection and those measures went onto place the day we heard of the first possible case. This is not something I want to go through a third time but the measures of the current official emergency plans
http://www.defra.gov.uk/footandmouth/
suggest to me that they are willing to screw up by the numbers again.

This is not helped by the recruitment policy of DEFRA, if you are related to a farmer, know anything about farming or Horrors live on a farm you are automatically disqualified from employment within DEFRA.