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.