MADAM – Hilarious “brain dead” badger and deer TB farce The Great Badgers and TB Debate has rumbled back and forth for some 40 years, since the “first” TB badgers in 1971 in Glos. and Wales, but with no decisive conclusions, since all the scientific evidence is actually of a circumstantial ‘link’ between badgers and cattle with TB.

Impossible to prove if it is merely cows giving badgers TB, rather than, improbably, badgers giving cows a respiratory lung infection.

Recently, experts have identified deer as another source of the cattle problem, but from 1972-97 out of some 2,000 deer sampled, there were a mere 30 with TB, as a modest spillover to the commonest local deer, sika, fallow and roe.

Since then, with cattle TB reappearing on Exmoor, a few red deer, too, have become infected by spillover from cows.

Cattle TB has always been an infectious broncho-pneumonia disease.

The cattle TB crisis is blindingly obviously due simply to an explosion of TB within the cattle population.

Clearly, where half or three quarters of a herd are affected, it is simply cattle-to-cattle spread – not, as the Godfray scientific team thought, proof that there must have been a “super-super-infectious” badger wreaking havoc.

Farmers and vets are still certain that it is mainly due to spread by badgers.

Both views cannot be true.

The whole saga hinges on perpetuating a very silly mistake.

How can even senior vets and farmers who should know better still be so bizarrely certain that badgers are the main ‘problem’ in spreading bovine (ie. cattle) TB?

They unbelievably ‘rule out’ a cattle source to the spread, saying that since cattle-to-cattle spread is unimportant, and since TB badgers are often found after bad herd breakdowns, it must all be due to badgers.

Well, it is true that most of the random scatter of new herd breakdowns are simply first identified and caused by cattle reactors which have not yet developed any visible lung lesions. These are so are so-called unconfirmed cases, and everyone has wrongly been assuming that they do not have TB, ie. are false positive reactors like those with avian TB, so must be “due to badgers”.

The embarrassingly simple truth however, is that they are merely cases in the early stages of the disease.

This is especially true in edge and low risk areas without any background TB in either badgers or cattle, so that even DEFRA ‘s new (2013) Eradication strategy documents happily admit that most breakdowns can only be via bought-in cattle (ie. not after all via a non-existent badger TB reservoir).

The ultimate hilarious absurdity, being fostered by DAFTA, Dr. May, and Team Badger, is that ring vaccination of badgers will stop the spread of cattle TB from high risk to edge areas.

A wonderfully insane solution to a non-existent problem.

All the cattle herd breakdowns supposedly “due” to badgers have been due to unconfirmed early TB reactors all along.

Victim not villain.

Martin Hancox

ex-government TB Panel Stroud