'Creative inertia' was a phrase used in a TV sit-com a few years ago, where the civil servants guided their minister through his duties. Or not as the case may be. The resultant circular tour was known as 'creative inertia' where things appeared to be proceeding - but were not. In fact they were going backwards at an alarming rate, or at best, staying the same.
And so we come to the subject of this blog. And a reminder - if that was ever needed - that this country's low point in disease eradication came in 1986. In that year GB reported less than 100 herds with breakdowns, and 638 cattle were slaughtered.
Fast forward over many dilutions of Ministerial badger policy - none of them of any benefit to cattle - and we arrive at today's total shambles. New TBagger groups, all searching for an instant solution, and failing to look over their collective shoulders to what had been tried and failed, many times before.
We've explored these in detail in past postings, but they do bear repeating - if only to remind the newbies that the result of their direction of travel will be more dead cattle, and very little else.
After the TB eradication sweeps in the late 50s and 60s, a couple of persistent blots on MAFF's landscape spoilt an otherwise clean sheet. A fierce Scotsman, William Tait was sent to Cornwall to clean up that patch. His efforts. brutal though they were (on cattle herds) failed to stem the tide of TB but his steam cleaning of the old Cornish cob barns was responsible for not a few collapses.
It wasn't until Roger Muirhead from Gloucestershire, in 1971 made a positive link to TB infected badgers, and started clearing infected groups from persistently infected farms, that the maps took on a different hue, and reactor numbers dropped.
In Ireland, almost two decades later Liam Downie following a similar political badger love-in, applied the same cattle measures, and he too failed to reduce the number of reactors. In fact, because he was searching so diligently, numbers went up.
And in 2004/5, the diminutive leader of the English badger dispersal trial, the RBCT, ( Professor John Bourne) constructed a politically led manifesto to repeat all these cattle measures, and gradually, they are creeping insidiously into our lives.
Add to that a few commercial opportunists hand in hand with a couple of political vets, and Houston, we have a problem.
But we do have data. Collected patiently and carefully by both ministry vets and Meat Hygiene Service.
We are hearing some alarming 'factoids' about the universally applied intradermal skin test. But apparently only applicable in certain areas of England, Wales and Ireland it seems. In the rest of the world, it works just fine. Now if this internationally used skin test was missing X per cent of infected cattle in parts of Great Britain (take your pick on what figure is doing the rounds) but let's settle on 20 per cent, then eventually, all these disease riddled animals would end up in abattoirs. That's what happens. And they would go down the line past a Meat Hygiene operative, trained to look for evidence of - tuberculosis.
So how many do they find? Defra reported in 2014:
Between 2009 and 2013, over 11.1 million cattle were recorded as slaughtered in 313 slaughterhouses in GB. During this period 7,370 samples with lesions suspicious of bTB were submitted to AHVLA by meat inspection teams of the Food Standards Agency (FSA) leading to an overall rate of 0.66 submissions per 1,000 animals slaughtered.
M.bovis was identified in 5,366 [of those] samples.
But 5,366 out of 11.1 million cattle with culture positive evidence of zTB is not 20 per cent missed, or even 2 per cent. Its just under 0.05 per cent. Some reservoir. Some lie.
In 2019, according to Defra / AHDB figures 2.8m head were examined by MHS operatives, after passing through a GB abattoir.
Of those, 601 animals in the Defra stats for 2019 were confirmed as having zoonotic TB. (Line 15)
Having girded up the blog calculator, we make 601 confirmed cases found from 2.8m inspections, which are designed specifically to look for TB in cattle, just 0.02 per cent of the national kill that year.
That reservoir is a mirage. It doesn't exist.
And similar results were found when in 2007, Defra spent £2.8m on the Pathman project (SE 3013) Reactor animals, 32 of which had lung lesions were subject to a complete post mortem, taking several hours. And samples taken to support the 'undiscovered' reservoir of TB in cattle. However their results were statistically very similar to the OV pms done in 8 minutes in the abattoir. And more importantly, of all those samples, and those taken in a parallel project, not one was capable of onward transmission. Not a single one.
So fast forward to a 2020 report by Defra on the current situation. They confirm that 1986 was the low point for TB in our cattle, but fail to elucidate on why things have got progressively worse. For that information, see this posting together with the Defra maps to illustrate.
From that 2020 report, one bit caught our attention:
Every breakdown herd has the dubious benefit of a Defra 'risk assessment', where a lot of questions are asked about the herd, how it is fed, how it relates to neighbouring herds etc.
And the presence of wildlife, particularly badgers. The results for 2019, are shown on p.36 as follows:
At county level, the most common source of infection attributed within the HRA was badgers, with over 70% in Cornwall (78.0%), Staffordshire (71.5 %) and Shropshire (70.1%) (Table 3.2.1).
Within the Edge Area, the source of infection with the highest contribution varied between counties. Derbyshire (61.4%), Cheshire (60.7%), Oxfordshire (55.2%), Northamptonshire (51.9%) and Warwickshire (50.3%)
All had more than half of the weighted source attributed to badgers.
So why, when their own operatives in the field are producing data which attributes up to 78 per cent of TB infections to badgers, are Defra's minions so hell bent on killing the sentinels of their own failed policies? That question was rhetorical, by the way.
The direction of travel appears to be more cattle tests, more sensitive cattle tests, more dead cattle - and vaccinate badgers. This despite the third party casualty reported in Ireland, which blows a rather large hole in badger vaccine's VMD limited liability status - 'to do no harm'.
The (dead) Irish cat, we think, would disagree.
