That this House notes the encouraging downward trend in bovine TB incidence in England and Wales; urges the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairsnot to put these improvements at risk by culling badgers; further urges the Secretary of State to follow the peer-reviewed advice of the Independent Scientific Group to concentrate on improving and rigidly enforcing cattle-based controls and testing procedures in order to bring the disease under control; and calls on the Secretary of State to take account of the opportunities now offered by successful badger vaccination trials and to prepare the way with Brussels for the earliest possible application and introduction of cattle vaccines that offer the only real long-term solution.
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3 responses to Badger Culls
BADGERS INNOCENT
After being on the govmt TB Panel, & 20 yrs involvement ;
BADGERS ARE NOT THE PROBLEM
NO-One after 40 yrs research has shown how badgers might give cows a respiratory lung infection
Cattle crisis is due to explosion amongst cattle ( the problem all along)
The perturbation /ISG NONSENSE, is the biggest pseudoscientific HOAX of the century !!! TRAGIC everyone has been brainwashed !
www.badgersandtb.com
What happened to your web site at
Why badgers need to be culled
What downward trend?
Anyone who takes the trouble to look into why cattle incidence appears to have gone through such large changes since 2005 and why incidence was high in 2008 and low in 2010 will find that this is largely due to the switch from the Weybridge tuberculin (which is the agent used in the skin test) to the less potent Lelystad tuberculin.
A Veterinary Laboratories Agency report reports that between 1st Jan 2005 and 30th Jun 2009, out of 26,363,877 cattle tests, tests using the Weybridge tuberculin found on average that 497 animals tested positive in every 100,000 tests whereas the Lelystad tuberculin only found 391.
If you Google the following you will be able to find these figures.
Tuberculin Usage for testing for bovine TB in Great Britain. Report for 1st January 2005 to 30th June 2009.
Great Britain is now no longer manufacturing the tuberculin at Weybridge and is using the Lelystad tuberculin exclusively. As expected incidence figures for 2011 up to the end of August shows that the problem is on the increase again. More recent figures are not currently available due to an IT problem at DEFRA.
Any report which is now being published (such as the report which I am now commenting on) which says that there is a downward trend in bovine TB incidence in England and Wales is very misleading.
Unfortunately in the South West of England and Wales the disease has now become established in the badger population to the extent that it is now no longer possible to address the problem in just cattle alone. Also the prospects for addressing the problem using vaccination alone in conjunction with the current strict cattle controls are poor. This is why it is so necessary to cull badgers if bovine TB in both cattle and wildlife is to be controlled. In the last 2 decades the proportion of cattle slaughtered due to TB has increased by a factor of 5 every ten years. It is this statistic and the poor prospect of vaccination significantly impacting on this increase that is providing the motivation to address bovine TB through culling badgers.
Regarding the contribution which badgers make to the dynamics of the disease, Prof Donnelly was deputy chair during the RBCT badger culling trial, and partly responsible for designing the trial. In 2010 she published a paper titled
Is There an Association between Levels of Bovine Tuberculosis in Cattle Herds and Badgers
In this she stated the following
The results indicate that TB in cattle herds could be substantially reduced, possibly even eliminated, in the absence of transmission from badgers to cattle.
Badger Culls
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