Badgers not the main culprit for passing TB

I am writing in response to Ann Darracott’s recent letter (September 1), where she stated that commoners grazing cattle on local commons were concerned that badgers could be passing TB to their cattle.

Badgers are not the main culprit for the transmission of bTB – which is a bovine disease passed primarily between infected

cattle who harbour the disease due to inadequate testing, poor bio-security and uncontrolled cattle movements.

This evidence is supported by many esteemed reports, including the very recent Badgers Found Dead Study (BFDS), whose results clearly show that badgers are not a reservoir host for bovine TB, but rather a spillover host.

These latest results support those of a previous survey of culled badgers in 2016, which found less than five per cent of culled badgers tested positive for TB.

A total of 372 badger carcasses underwent post mortem examination and sampling.

In all five southern counties – including Berkshire – only three M. tuberculosis complex bovis (MTCB) positive cases were identified, all from Oxfordshire, giving a prevalence for Oxfordshire of 3.8 per cent (3 out of 79), and an overall prevalence for the area, that includes Berkshire, of 1.0 per cent.

The answer to solving bTB in cattle should be to focus on the cattle themselves – one where farmers should be incentivised to develop robust biosecurity measures and one where the testing regime is radically improved.

The Government needs to push forward with better testing methods and must speed up its plans for vaccination research and deployment for cattle – but most of all it needs to stop the badger ‘blame game’ that then gets picked up by ill-informed members of the public – as this at heart is a disease where transmission has been proved to be cattle to cattle – not badgers.

JILL HOBLIN Chairman – Binfield Badger Group

Berkshire