Failure to deal with TB in cattle a disgrace

IT is a national disgrace that this country alone out of all of the developed nations of the world seems unable to deal with tuberculosis in cattle.

It is a national disgrace that despite the conclusion of the Independent Scientific Group reporting on the Random Badger Culling Trials that badgers perturbed by culling did infect cattle with TB and the failure of the introduction of pre-movement testing for cattle to reduce the incidence of TB, that there are still people looking for excuses to blame cattle movements, husbandry methods, or the skin test for the onward march of the disease.

It is a national disgrace that taxpayers money has been expended on a test that can reliably identify setts occupied by TB infected badgers and that it is not being used.

It is a national disgrace that decades ago we were close to eliminating TB from both cattle and the environment, and that since we have followed policies approved by so called badger-lovers, that have resulted in a burgeoning disease problem, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of cattle and the deaths of thousands of badgers from TB, road traffic accidents, and now culling.

This is not an intractable problem that we face. The intractable problem lies in the minds of people like Kevin Caveney (Letters, December 24), who prefer to keep up the pretence that bovine TB can be beaten by some yet to be developed vaccine, by wasting more and more money on testing and slaughtering more and more cattle, while TB infected badgers roam the countryside at will.