The RBCT - a gift that keeps on giving.

We knew the smell of this most politically motivated piece of so called 'research' may permeate for a while, but it seems that Oxford University want to keep its emissions rolling on. John Bourne (pictured) led the RBCT from 1998 - 2005.

Reported this week in the Guardian was an ascertion that cattle herds on the edge of an RBCT (Randomised Badger Culling Trial) - or as like to refer to it - the Badger Dispersal Trial, were more likely to have reactors.

After their eight night forays into infected populations, catching a few badgers daft enough to grab a few peanuts, was never going to clear TB from the area. But according to the trial leader, it was never meant to.

The Guardian's report states:

"In the two-part study, researchers re-analysed data from the randomised badger culling trial that took place between 1998 and 2005. The initial study produced data consistent with the RCBT showing beneficial results to cattle in the areas where culling took place.

However, a secondary study using peer-reviewed analyses of the RCBT found a 29% increased risk of bTB infections in cattle in surrounding areas.

The secondary study aimed to address scientists’ concern around the “lack of evidence” supporting the RCBT experiment. It also suggested that irrespective of the statistical methodology used, badger culling during the RCBT was associated with an increased risk of tuberculosis in neighbouring cattle.

So it is with the greatest respect, that we remind the researchers, trawling through data from 25 years ago, of the words of its leader, the diminutive John Bourne when he addressed the EFRA Committee about 'his' trial in 2007.

The phrase ' culling in this way', was not the answer: in other words, as many as we could trap in a very few nights, leaving a fractured and highly infectious community behind. And ' it's important we do say this. Protocol was not set by the team, but by politicians'.

. . Thus the way the trial set up, was to enable a pre arranged conclusion to be reached. The RBCT was designed to fail. Some of the Wildlife unit staff involved, were equally scathing. As were several very experienced veterinarians.

Nevertheless, those highly intelligent folk at OXford have grabbed the data, rearranged it and come up with fairly obvious conclusion.

It's such a great pity that their research didn't reach the depths of John Bourne and his team's duplicity, obfuscation and downright dishonesty when addressing politicians, but especially the farmers about this expensive farce.

The result is that we all see more of these, on our fields.

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?

Rural Harmony??????????????????

Today was made even more bizarre with the announcement of a knighthood for a superannuated guitar player with a degree in astro physics. Part of the reason given was 'services to music' - fair enough. But the other reason was his wildlife escapades, and the creation of what was euphemistically described as 'rural harmony'.

The musician is guitar player  Dr. Brian May, who hopes that his newly conferred knighthood will give his causes 'more clout'.

Maybe a few more people will listen to me than would otherwise, you know, if it’s Sir Brian on the phone,” said May, who spoke to The Associated Press via Zoom from his house in Windlesham, Surrey. 

The report explains:

May has campaigned against badger culling and fox hunting through an animal welfare group he founded in 2010 — named Save Me after the 1980 Queen song.

We have explored Dr. May's involvement with all things rural, since 2012 when that stunning piece of artwork appeared behind him, at a launch of his charity 'Save Me'. But as we said at the time, exactly what is this now ennobled musician (or star gazer) trying to 'save' badgers from? 

Not tuberculosis, as they are an extremely successful host of this Grade 3 zoonosis.  Until the disease overwhelms them in a painful and excruciating death. By which time, the bacteria they carry will have been available to any mammal crossing their paths. Territorial scrapping and bite wounding being a common way of introducing micobacterium bovis into the body. As below.

We believe Dr. May is interested in vaccinating badgers. But that route, despite the hype, was mainly to find out if vaccinating these creatures harmed them. Not the efficacy  of the procedure and the effect on the shedding of bacteria into the wider environment. For that we had to go to Ireland, where we discovered a domestic cat had been pts after several years of ongoing antibiotics for shoulder and movement problems. 

But the stand out piece from those reports was the strain of zTB that had infected the cat and the length of time it was able to be traced after badgers had been vaccinated.

The strain was unique. Danish strain 1331 used only in badger vaccines. And after vaccination:

Numerous acid-fast bacilli have been found within macrophages at the site of BCG vaccination (subcutaneous route) 371 days after administration in badgers, suggesting the possibility of persistence of BCG within a low percentage of this vaccinated population (Lesellier et al. 2006)."

Finally, we think another much loved country dweller may be less than happy with Dr. May's campaigning.  Hedgehog  numbers are in steep decline, while badger numbers are 'booming' as described in the piece on the link.

 But as we have found out,  to the great and the good, (and Sir Brian) some animals are more equal than others. A very Happy New Year.

 

 

They get there in the end

 

Following on from our last posting, which reported a significant drop of 20 per cent in cattle slaughterings, this week's press is reporting another bit of good news for long suffering cattle farmers.

Now that Doris has taken his wife out of the cabinet office, and a new broom has cleared the green blob from Defra, at last a bit of common sense is surfacing.

Farmers Guardian headline indicates a Ministerial 'rethink on ending culling'.

If you remember, George Eustice was quoted widely as saying 'we can't keep shooting badgers indefinitely'. Obviously his opinion didn't extend to slaughtering our sentinel tested cattle indefinitely and in greater numbers.  But let that pass.

Now freed of the influence of a couple of Goldsmiths, a Minister who was a supporter of the CAWF (Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation) and led by Doris's vegetarian wife, a bit of common sense has emerged. From new minister Mark Spencer, MP:

In an exclusive interview with Farmers Guardian, Mr Spencer said it was ‘wrong’ to set a fixed date to end badger culls, without taking into account epidemiological need.

Last year, Defra confirmed the licensing of new intensive culls would end after 2022, following a personal intervention from then Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

It was widely rumoured that Mr Johnson’s wife, Carrie, influenced the decision, which caused outrage in farming circles.

 Mr Spencer said: “We all want to stop shooting badgers and the way to stop shooting badgers is to eradicate TB.

In the report Mr. Spencer also points out:

“I think we need to follow the science here and look at what actually works. I am afraid you come to the conclusion that vaccination in areas around where TB is spreading to, with a cull in the middle of that area where it is very intensive, is probably the most practical way of dealing with TB."

And the way to find out if a hotspot is developing, with cattle as the sentinels of the problem, and herds nailed to the proverbial under restriction, is to use those details from the Risk Assessment which every new breakdown has from a member of APHA. 

If a new breakdown herd has had no bought in cattle since the herd's last clear test, and no cattle contact, it's 'Houston 'we have a problem'.

All that information should used, not filed to gather dust. 

You know it makes sense.

Mr Spencer concludes:

“The only way other countries have eradicated TB is to get (rid of) that sponge of TB in the natural population and unfortunately, badgers are part of that problem.

Quite.

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