Another year, another conference.

As 2023 draws to a close, the National TB conference was held in Worcestershire, where the great and good, and many recipients of APHA's largesse, spoke about zoonotic tuberculosis .

Sorry, no link to the reports, but as we read them, the divide between farms and the department which is supposed to support the eradication of this grade 3 zoonosis is described as a 'barrier' to progress.

Really? When livestock farmers, and some of their arable neighbours have put their respective hands in their pockets to fund large scale badger control, which has seen incidence drop in England to levels not seen since 2008. 

It isn't as if the powers that be do not know and have peer reviewed, expensively produced evidence of the problem. Both in badgers, deer, cattle and other companion mammals. But they would prefer to keep this gravy train running. Of course they would.

In this post, we summarised some of the most salient of the PQs which anchor this site. The answers, recorded for posterity in Hansard, relied on published work done carefully and with no bias, over the previous years. Nothing has changed.

Badgers are the single most successful host of zTB in this country.

In just one ml (1ml) of badger urine from an infected critter, some 300 cfu* can be found which can set off a tuberculous lesion in any mammal which ingests or sniffs it.   * Colony forming Units.

Even tiny 'miliary'  lesions in badgers are hooching with bacteria, whereas deer and cattle can have huge tuberculous lesions, but very few cfu bacteria to be seen - or shared.

It has been found that just 1cfu ingested by a calf and 70 by an adult cow, can cause zTB in that animal. And badgers can void up to 30 ml at each incontinent dribble. 

Deer have come into the frame recently,  but unless, like the white tailed deer in Michigan, USA are encouraged to share cattle feed, then they are not the primary problem. They are a symptom.

All this was known thirty years ago. And ignored.

'Social science' was discussed too, with the emphasis offered by Defra's Dr. Ruth Little who suggested that "when it came to zTB, we must move away from a 'paternalistic relationship' idea that Government has complete control. and instead adopt a more 'co-design approach'.

She added "It is also that wider picture of trust in Government. Farmers need to trust the agency who is delivering on their behalf so they feel some sort of agency (sp?) in dealing with the disease on-farm."

Having been involved with this subject, often first hand (or particularly first hand) for the last three decades, any mention of 'trust' evaporated long ago. As did what the lady refers to as co-design'. 

It is Defra's responsibility to deal with a grade 3 zoonosis, but they have constantly abdicated that over many years, preferring to play with vaccines, bio security and blame.

And of course shoot cattle. Many thousands of them too.

And having listened to the Covid enquiry's evidence offered by those in whom we are supposed to 'trust', is it any wonder that livestock farmers, under many coshes presently from the Nut Zero brigade, feel that trust in government is the very last thing they have.

To cull or not to cull...

 

It is some twenty years since we started this blog, using Parliamentary Questions - all 500 of them - as its anchor. The written answers were illuminating, and still valid today.

A previous boss of Woodchester Park, otherwise known as 'Badger Heaven', Dr. Chris Cheeseman was heard on more than one occasion when asked how to keep badgers away from cattle replied with an elegant shrug "You can't. Get rid of your cattle".

And this message has been recycled with a Welsh Labour MP, Joyce Watson  suggesting that farms with persistent TB problems, should find another way to use their farms.

Pine trees? wild bird seed? Or perhaps greenwash air travel with those unicorn emissions, so beloved of the international jet set, off setting their guilt with carbon credits.

But Labour are sticking with their policy of non lethal intervention for the carrier of most tuberculosis bacteria in our farmed environment. Although they will happily slaughter cattle, goats alpacas and sheep - they will not harm a hair on a coughing badger's head.

The 'V' word is still bandied around, and although several wadges of cash have been thrown at vaccination, little has been published except the flaws in its results. 

But after ten years since the pilot badger culls started in England, followed by many areas achieving some good results,  Defra's statistics to mid 2023 show that cattle slaughter figures are down by over 20 per cent in England, while Wales' s problem rumble on particularly heading North and west.

The following table shows prevalence of TB (herds not cleared by repeated test / slaughter)

England showed  - 18 per cent overall and - 20 per cent in the High Risk Area, while Wales showed a +68 per cent rise in their low risk area.. 

Numbers of cattle slaughtered are similarly heading downwards in England with a 21 per cent drop overall, and the High Risk Area showing - 24 per cent.. Best not mention Wales - west and Low risk.

And despite rumours to the contrary, and a complicated way of presenting statistics, NHI (New Herd Incidents are down in England too. By 16 per cent overall, and -18 per cent in the High Risk Areas.

Possibly, the farmer led (and paid for culls) are actually having an effect.

As our PQs showed all those years ago, no matter how many cattle measures  rain down on livestock farmers, without culling infectious badgers, no progress can be made on eradication of this Grade 3 zoonotic pathogen. And no amount of mathematical gymnastics of x100 years divided by x, y or z, detracts from the fact that every single number is a farm, every cow slaughtered is owned by a farmer and these inconvenient facts can be frequently forgotten. 

So to the newbies, both in their Parliaments and elsewhere, it's all been done before. And most of the results are logged on this site.

Clarkson, Kaleb and badgers.

We have been waiting for the TB balloon to go up, as Jeremy Clarkson let rip into some of the more 'unusual' systems, farmers and in particular livestock farmers, have to endure in his series on Amazon Prime. 

Presently we are subjected to a blizzard of bad publicity, often headed by the farming unions and levy payers' representatives apologising for our very existence. Shoot a cow, plant a tree and sell your carbon credits so that the great and the good can Carry on Partying. Or attending far flung jamborees in pursuit of  Net Zero. 

In series 2 of Clarkson's farm, Jeremy met the crazy situation of a fledgling business which had lost half its dairy herd .  The cause, was definitely badger related. So in typical Clarkson speke, he had the answer:

"We can shoot them?”

"No, you can't do that" (shock horror from the farm's agent )

"I'll run over them with my big tractor"

"No, that would never  do"

"I'll fumigate their sett then”.

"Nope. Their ancestral home has a grade 1 listing. You can't do that either."

Jeremy very accurately described badgers as 'like teenagers'. Out all night, wreck land and crops, eat his hedgehogs, spread a very serious disease, then come home and sleep all day. And are untouchable.

The first casualty to cross Jeremy's path was a young dairy farmer, Emma Ledbury, who had just set up a milk vending business. But in this week's Farmers Guardian, the second is young Kaleb Cooper  who has invested in 21 dairy cows. 

The farm on which they now reside, has been hit with a TB breakdown, so the merry- go- round of testing and more testing, (of cattle at least) slaughter and stress, goes on. And on. Welcome to our world. 

These two cases are high profile, and Amazon Prime's series with Jeremy heading it is an ideal vehicle to show the crazy, expensive and futile situation which we have endured for more years than we have been scribbling this blog. Which sadly is approaching two decades. 

We have told the stories of  whole herd slaughter in Staffordshire, and individual cases of named companion cattle . The end is the same. We shoot the big black and white ones, and ignore the smaller, endemically  diseased black and white ones.

A non-binary spoligotype?

 

We posted two years ago, the story of an Irish cat  which after several years of veterinary treatment, was X rayed and found to have generalised skeletal tuberculosis. The cat was euthanised at seven years old.

Samples (plural) were taken from this cat, and the strain or spoligotype found to be Danish type 1331, uniquely used in badger vaccines. The paper explains:

PCR and the usual culture tests revealed m.bovis  But the the spoligotype was revealed as Danish Strain 1331 used locally in badger vaccines.  After another six months with no improvement, intermittent lameness  and pain -  and  now a  definite diagnosis of z Tuberculosis, this young cat was euthanised.

So, culture tests, PCR etc. and on several bits of this now very dead cat, all showed Danish 1331.

But roll forward two years and the authors have withdrawn their paper, citing their spoligotyping as 'unsafe', thus negating their conclusions.

 "An error in the interpretation of the genomic sequence data and the fact that the isolate was not the BCG strain reported in the manuscript"

So what have we got here? A young cat, treated for three years and eventually found to have zoonotic tuberculosis, samples (plural) from which  apparently all showed Danish type 1331? A peer reviewed result, and now it's not strain 1331? But no information as to exactly what the strain is. How very 'Irish'.

So has spoligotyping  (DNA matches) become fashionably 'non-binary'? 

DNA is binary. It's either a match or not. Yes or no, but not the milkman, as we were told. Not he/ she/ they/ them or whatever the chosen term is today. 

But the 21st century has turned science on its head, and we now have non binary spoligotypes? Really?