ALTHOUGH farmers and vets are still absolutely certain that “Badgers are the main cause of the spread of TB”, so more culls are essential post May 7; this is a spectacularly wrong misunderstanding of how TB is actually transmitted and spread within the cattle population, and there are two reasons why the actual badger contribution to cattle TB is probably zero.

There are far too few super-excretor badgers which might be a risk to other badgers or cattle “out there”.

The two recent pilot culls came to 2,494 badgers, so translating from the RBCT/Krebs cull data, perhaps c. 400 with TB, but only 1.65 per cent superinfectious ones, ie. just seven TB badgers from c. 300 sq.km.

A cost of c. £15million, including some £3million disgracefully wasted on extra policing to protect shooters from protestors or vice versa.

And if a typical herd breakdown costs c. £30,000, that is a mere £210,000 possibly saved if they actually improbably did cause herd TB, hardly a rational cost-effective policy.

DEFRA’s textbook high-density, high-risk badger study area is at Woodchester Park, with some 350 badgers in nine sq.km.

But there has not been even a single herd breakdown in the dozen herds there since 1975, which could unequivocally be “due to badgers”.

Not surprising, given that there were only 17 superexcretor TB badgers over 14 years.

And a mere 32 TB badger scats out of 4,023 sampled over five years, hardly a major risk to cattle.

And despite the confusion over how cattle catch TB it most certainly cannot be from badgers.

The Godfray 2013 latest review in the Proc. of the Royal Society, in identifying areas of uncertainty clearly states (para.15):- “Little is known about how M.bovis is transmitted between badgers and cattle. Transmission may be indirect; for example, through contamination of pasture, feed, and drinking water. Alternatively, direct transmission via aerosol droplets at close contact may occur, possibly inside farm buildings as well as outdoors. No quantitative estimates of any of these transmission rates or their relative importance are currently available “.

So After 44 years’ research, as the Krebs 1997 review noted “It is not known if, how, or to what extent badgers might transmit TB to cattle”.

Cattle TB is in fact simply a broncho-pneumonia, like human consumption (lesions in the lungs or draining lymph nodes badgersandtb.com); caught by prolonged close contact in barns or milking parlours.

A classic study in 1904 placed 13 calves in a barn with a two yard gap to older TB cattle, so purely aerosol spread happened, five calves were reactors after six months, the other eight by one year.

In the only proven case where badgers gave TB to calves in a very artificial yard experiment, our calves exposed for under a month did not apparently have TB.

Martin Hancox

Stroud