MADAM – Rather embarrassingly and hilariously, the entire 40 years old pseudo-scientific ‘great badgers and TB debate’ has come about entirely because of inadequacies in the tests to identify actual TB cattle.

While farmers and vets are absolutely certain that badgers are ‘the main cause’ of the spread of TB, in fact all the herd breakdowns allegedly ‘due to badgers’ have actually been merely spread by cattle caught so early in the disease progression that they do not yet have visible lesions in the lungs, so-called unconfirmed reactors.

Even more embarrassingly, there have been no TB badgers found after these supposed ‘badger breakdowns’ (please see Death of Great Debate, .badgersandtb.com).

So, it was intriguing to read your account of the New Ulster ‘TVR’ strategy to tackle badgers and cattle TB.

The first years trial only caught 280 badgers (some 35,000 to go).

But the idea is to test, vaccinate healthy ones, and remove infected badgers using two new cutting edge tests.

The IFN test finds early TB cases, whereas the old Brocktest would only find late TB cases since it is a full blown late TB antibody test.

I left the government’s badger ‘CONsultative’ panel of political pawns when Maff (now Defra), tried to persuade us that a 41 per cent accurate test would be a good idea (less use than tossing a coin with 50 per cent accuracy).

The second rapid DPP, or Dual Path Platform test uses either clotted serum or maybe whole blood.

But it ought to be blindingly obvious before they’ve even started that a TVR strategy will be wildly impractical and uneconomic, and utterly pointless anyway.

Badgers are utterly irrelevant to the problem.

Cattle controls alone reduced TB in Northern Ireland to a mere 171 reactors in 1973, without any badger culls whatsoever, badgers being merely a spillover host from cows.

Relaxing controls by going to three-year testing allowed TB to explode out of control, so they had to rapidly go back to annual testing.

Similarly despite the post foot and mouth upsurge, strict controls showed a halving of cattle TB within six years via cattle controls alone.

So a great pity that N Ireland ministers have been bamboozled by farmers to launch a policy guaranteed to fail .

Two further tests are near to being put into practical use.

LGC Forensics offers a rapid DNA test for bacilli eg in badger setts but more importantly for assessing M. bovis in tissue samples.

The current use of quick PCR DNA tests already allows for an understanding of home ranges of DNA types (spoligotypes), with so-called “clonal expansion” by cattle movements within the local cattle population, (absolutely nothing to do with armies of TB badgers marching outwards into these Edge areas at c. 10 miles per year, which is why Team Badger’s “badger ring vaccine” idea is such crass nonsense).

And the Alastair Hayton’s ENFERPLEX test, from Synergy, is once again a rapid blood test with results in 30 minutes, which does better than the skin test for alpacas and goats.

The Irish have been using such a late TB blood chemiluminescent ENFER antibody test to find the skin test Non-reactor (anergic) active spreader cows which are the culprit in herds with chronic TB.

Apparently several herds in Glos. which had been under TB restriction for six to eight years have “suddenly” gone clear, but that can hardly be because the pilot cull removed a mere 253 badgers, only one or two of which might have been TB super-infectious.

Is it not simply that vets have very belatedly woken up and decided to give the ENFER, or another IDEXX-Ab test, a try for problem herds?

Seems the southern Irish are urgently seeking to recruit “badger killers” to cull another 12,000 badgers over the next two years, even though their DAFM or Dept. of Agriculture admit they know culls don’t work, and they are not even sure after all this time of the alleged route of transmission of TB from badgers to cows.

Ironic that Dr. Liam Downey of ERAD told the first International Conference on Bovine TB (ICMB)in 1991, that: “Of course we’ve known for years that badger culls do not work”.

Culling more thanover 100,000 since the 1964 low point has not stopped the spread from residual southwest hotspots back across the whole country, exactly as in GB with another 100,000 pointlessly slaughtered since 1971.

And DAFTA here are urgently trialling gassing since it would be what Princess Anne calls ‘a kinder way to control the badger “Problem” ‘, the whole idea of shooting “Free running” badgers being as predicted, what even Prof. David Macdonald described in cautious “scientific” jargon as an “epic failure”.

The Porton Down trials of cyanide gassing arising from the Zuckerman 1980 Report found them to be wholly inhumane and ineffective, even power gassing failing to reach the outermost parts of underground tunnels.

One sett had to be re-gassed 19 times.

And carbon monoxide gassing would still be illegal under the 1973 and 1992 Badgers Acts.

Political “progress” forwards is actually being several steps backwards, with wonderfully insane solutions to a non-existent problem – Old Brock is victim, not villain.

Martin Hancox

Ex-government TB panel

Stroud