Basic facts first. Bovine TB is a cattle disease which usually sees less than 0.5% of the UK cattle herd slaughtered ahead of farm schedule each year.  The livestock owner is paid compensation for culled cattle - Defra and the Welsh Government regularly publish their tables of compensation rates - and once checked almost all of the meat is sold into the human food chain (it’s perfectly safe to eat).

Over 90% of all bovine TB cases arise from cattle to cattle infection (94%, Donnelly et al 2013). The remainder of cases are attributed to a range of sources including ‘unknown’, and the disease is carried by a wide range of species, domestic (farm cats and hunting hounds in particular), wild (including earthworms, foxes, hedgehogs, mouse, deer, and badgers), and non-bovine livestock (particularly deer, sheep, and camelids) acting as secondary hosts. A handful of people each year contract the disease, those at risk are individuals working closely with cattle especially those handling carcasses. Pasteurisation of milk means that the public are no longer at risk of TB caught from milk from infected cattle. Cattle most likely originally contracted TB from humans when they started to live in proximity with people in pre-history. So far, so objective.

For the farmer, it feels anything but objective – it feels personal, devastating. It’s their cattle, animals they have cared for and weren’t ready to slaughter. In business terms, the unplanned loss of productive dairy cattle in particular can be expensive, as can even the basic movement controls necessary to control the spread of the disease off farm. On average, the cost to a farmer of a herd breakdown is £6,600. But if your milk cheque that month is the difference between paying the bills and going into debt, it’s a crisis. In crisis, it’s no wonder people look for an immediate and, to their eyes, obvious cause. Even if it’s the wrong cause.

There are three problems – control of disease in cattle, support needed by farmers to upgrade farm infrastructure to reduce disease risk, and support needed by them if cattle are affected by disease. Here, I’m only dealing with the control of the disease in cattle, and how the approaches in Wales and England differ.

First, ignore the unhelpful rhetoric of ‘eradicating bovine TB’ – how many infectious diseases have we eradicated so far? Precisely. Smallpox and rinderpest – and both are vaccinated against. And despite that, rinderpest remains under surveillance.

To meet the criteria for an eradicable disease, it must be infectious, humans must normally be the main host, there must be an effective vaccine or effective treatments for the disease, and there is the official and financial backing necessary to make vaccines and treatments commonly available. Rinderpest (another cattle disease) was eradicated through attention paid to livestock, wild animals (despite existing in their millions) were never in dense enough numbers, nor living in sufficiently close proximity, to become self-sustaining reservoirs of the disease. Although the disease did kill many, many native herbivores, changing the landscape in parts of East Africa, they were the unfortunate casualties of the domestic cattle industry, not the source. While rinderpest did not infect humans, it led to enormous famines across the developing world, so international investment followed and resulted in the effective vaccine relied on today, and the present surveillance arrangements.

Surveillance for bovine TB, currently the single biggest cost to the farming industry, will remain necessary for the foreseeable future - not because of any risk of famine (that isn’t a bTB risk) but because of the risks to disease control and normal trading conditions.

Think back to Covid. We all learned that to deal with a highly infectious disease we needed the following:

1. Hygiene – biosecurity
2. Widespread, accurate, reliable testing
3. Vaccination
4. Surveillance

Bovine TB is no different in terms of its needs. In England and Wales, the approaches taken are different and incomplete, as are the results.

At least in Wales, the results are better - and have been better and lower cost - than in England. Points to Wales.

But why? Well, no one has vaccinated cattle, while testing of cattle is far better in Wales as is biosecurity and surveillance.

Yet Governments in both nations are working from the same evidence and the same scientific advice. I’ve always valued that one of the great things about science is that it doesn’t care what your beliefs are, and even less what your political affiliations might be – scientific facts persist regardless. Often rather awkwardly for proponents of Business As Usual.

Scientific facts being scientific facts don’t mean governments have to slavishly follow the science – policy is made up of many considerations, some are scientific, some are not. Personally, I think that as more and more strategic and policy decisions rest on available science, governments should have to either follow the science or make clear when they are not doing so and why they are not doing so. The public ought to be able to see honest calculations being made. At present, every government – regardless of party – is legally entitled to make policy decisions based on science or by setting science aside. As a woman, I have the vote not because there was some science in favour of it, but because it was the morally right, enlightened, fair, and socially effective thing to do. It also became politically inevitable.

The Conservative party now in Government in Westminster promised a cull of badgers before coming to power in 2010, included it in their election manifesto, and delivered once in office with the support of their coalition partners the LibDems. Indeed, the final decision was not taken by the then Secretary of State Caroline Spelman but by The Quad at Chequers on the back of two press packs – one written in the scenario of the cull going ahead, the other written in the scenario of the cull not going ahead. Optics and electoral mathematics. Not science.

More specifically during the 2010 General Election, the electoral promise differentiated the Conservatives from their opponents, Labour, who on the back of evidence of RBCT had ruled out a cull and was moving to vaccination (science should never be party political). Conservative MP and then new Defra Minister Jim Paice had also promised a former NFU President, Peter Kendall, a badger cull and delivered on this promise once in office. The rationale communicated to us within the Department at the time was that the then President needed the votes from NFU livestock members to secure the increased majority he required to remain President. There is nothing underhand about any candidate canvassing members of a private sector trade body on their priorities and committing to deliver what they want – it happens all the time. Whether there is anything to criticise in the actions of the then Minister is up to individuals – it is certainly not against any laws. But it had nothing to do with science or the body of evidence despite Westminsters claims to the contrary.

The Government in Wales avoided any such hostages to fortune so the difference between the approaches of the two nations is entirely one of choice – Wales has opted to follow the science.

Back to that science.

The statutory scientific advice to Defra in 2011, drawing on all of the available evidence, including the only real-world field study (Randomised Badger Culling Trial – RBCT), was that culling badgers would not make a meaningful difference to rates of bovine TB in cattle. Indeed, cull 70% of badgers for a minimum of four years, would only trim the rate of new herd breakdowns by 16% per annum on average “at best” out of a range running from 0% to 25%, with some areas seeing worsening results (Natural England, the Westminster Governments statutory adviser, got a dressing down for including the phrase “at best” in its written advice: that was a rough day).

Indeed, kill every single badger and the rate of new herd breakdown is still only trimmed by 16% on average at best. The Government in Westminster prefers not to quote the advice received from Natural England since it was and remains ‘unhelpful’ to Government policy.  

The only reason measures focused on badgers cannot address the disease in cattle is because it isn’t mainly hosted or transmitted by badgers.

Instead, it’s overwhelmingly hosted and transmitted by cattle to other cattle; it has secondary hosts in a wide variety of species including soil biota, and it’s a disease which survives in soil too.  This is what makes the disease so difficult to address using wildlife focused measures in the UK – it is now widespread in the environment, like it or not.

We could kill every single badger, deer, fox, hedgehog, farm cat, hunting hound, etc., and the disease will persist in cattle unless residual disease is found and removed from the herd, and the herd is protected from reinfection.

The policy focus must be on the thing which matters most economically – the cattle, protecting livelihoods.

Keeping cattle safe and healthy is possible without focussing on wildlife.

Some vets specialise in infectious disease control and one practice in particular has built up an enviable track record in clearing herds of bovine TB and keeping them clear (Dick Sibley, West Ridge Veterinary Practice).

Even without that practices’ attentions, keeping cattle healthy is not impossible: 85% of herds in the High Risk Area of the south west of England have been and remain free of bovine TB. That’s despite being in similar terrain and hosting similar populations of wildlife including badgers as the rest of the region. It isn’t ever as simple (or convenient) as pointing at badgers and scapegoating them. Points to Wales for acknowledging that.

Focussing on wildlife, let alone just one species, is an expensive distraction and diverts attention from the known risk factors – e.g.

• A history of bovine TB in the herd.
• Herd size – large herds have a much higher risk of bovine TB.
• Dairy herds have a markedly higher risk of bovine TB regardless of location.
• Proximity to cattle or holdings with bovine TB (includes co grazing, rented grazing, shared access ways).
• Trading history – unless strict risk-based trading is in place, buying in bovine TB is a significant possibility.
• Farm infrastructure – if the herd has expanded faster than farm infrastructure such as cattle housing, ventilation, slurry storage and handling, the disease risk increases, especially in hardship cases.
• Cattle movements – short and long distance (our highly specialised production model relies on many more frequent movements than models in the rest of the world, including the rest of Europe).

Paying scant attention to the listed risks, England has relied on a lengthy programme of intensive badger control (culling over 176,000 to 2022), weaker enforcement of biosecurity compared to Wales, no attention on non-bovine livestock, and the continued use of an unreliable and outdated bTB test (now 70 years old and superseded by more advanced technology). Points deducted from England. England is however learning – in the last few years, it is using a more reliable bTB test in cattle in some limited areas. In Defra’s response to the National Audit Office, Defra explained the rise in culled cattle by the use of this test going on to assure the NAO that this did not mean they were finding more disease. No, they weren’t – they were just identifying disease that was already there and is still there in those cattle which do not benefit from accurate reliable testing even now. Spectacular own goal for England and an extraordinary disservice to English farmers.

Wales has relied on more effective enforcement of biosecurity standards and much more rigorous testing (e.g. all herds are tested annually, in England some are tested only every 4 years); stricter movement controls even within the same farm business; treating Inconclusive Reactors as Positive Reactors (because the evidence shows it is necessary); one-off bTB testing of non-bovine livestock; the use of the much more reliable bTB test in cattle as standard; and cuts to compensation payments where cattle owners fail to comply with biosecurity requirements. The latter point is worth pausing to reflect on – if you didn’t lock your car one day and it was nicked, your insurance company is unlikely to pay out. The Welsh approach to bTB compensation payments being tied to biosecurity requirements is no more radical than that.

While Wales also uses vaccination of badgers in some very limited persistent areas and has used trap test release / cull of a very limited number of badgers, its approach is much more cattle focussed than in England. Given everything we know about the disease, its pathways, its range of hosts, the lack of cattle vaccine and post vaccine test, and its persistent concentrations decade after decade in given places, it’s the right approach right now. Several points to Wales.

Only top marks will go to the nation which rolls out the cattle vaccine and post vaccine test. Hugely overdue now.

How effective have these different approaches been to date? Ignore month to month and year to year. Bovine TB like many other diseases varies over the short term: the important factor to monitor is the long-term trend. Beware of anyone including Defra quoting the Downs Report pointing to a couple of years’ worth of data and claiming they prove anything – they don’t, the disease just doesn’t behave like that.

Defra press, Ministers and MPs on Westminster Government benches misrepresent the findings and grossly misrepresent the careful conclusions to be drawn from the Downs report (2019) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-49957-6  . This misleading narrative is then repeated by those within leading trade lobby groups – further misleading farmers to support a policy which hasn’t achieved the gains which the misrepresentation of evidence claims. Dr. Downs quite rightly includes a range of caveats in her report, together with entirely appropriate commentary on the limitations of the methodology available to her and her team, citing RBCT as still the only live field trial which was able to avoid having to use many of the assumptions Dr. Downs had to include in the statistical analysis her report relied upon. Her findings – that in two out of the areas where data from 2013 to 2017 was studied, incidence rates in cattle (i.e., the rate at which new outbreaks of disease occurred) went down by 66% in Gloucestershire and by 37% in Somerset. There were by comparison rises in other areas during the same period and no changes observed in some others. Dr. Downs is respected researcher and carefully sets out that association is not causation (despite what Defra Ministers and press or farming trade bodies claim). Dr. Downs goes on to write -

“Establishing causality between an intervention and a disease that involves transmission between animal species is challenging. Each component of the causal pathway is affected by environmental factors that differ between areas …… Furthermore, evaluating control policies that change over time in response to new information and political climate adds additional challenges……. The RBCT was a rigorously conducted scientific trial and the best evidence of what might be achievable from badger removal on a large scale in England. As a randomised controlled trial, it is less vulnerable to confounding by differences in the distribution of bTB risk factors between areas, than the current study [i.e. the Downs report]”

None of this ever makes into Ministerial statements from England, and I haven’t seen much in the farming trade press in England or in Wales. So, there is a risk that farmers are being denied some pretty important facts on both sides of the border. To add insult to PR injury, after the period studied by Downs, bTB rates in Gloucestershire and Somerset shot back up. That’s because it’s how the disease works – environmental conditions such as the weather combined with livestock farming practices and conditions have significant effects on a disease known to cycle up and down.

A much longer term trend peer reviewed analysis of the effect on bTB in cattle in the high risk area of England from 2009 to 2020 (Jones, Langton, McGill https://doi.org./10.1002/vetr.1384 ) offers an analysis including data from areas where no culling was undertaken (unlike Downs, RBCT, or other government funded research) and was published in the VetRecord in March last year. In attempting to demolish the report, Defra had to retract data and apologise in VetRecord for mistakenly using the wrong data. Defra have yet to accept any of the multiple invitations to meet either of the vets authoring the report, Mark W. Jones or Iain McGill. Indeed, Defra have so far refused to discuss the report at all. Not a good look for England, not atypical for the current incarnation of Defra.

Luckily Defra and the Welsh Government both publish the rates of disease in cattle on their websites. Defra publish the long term trends for England, Scotland, and Wales (see https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/incidence-of-tuberculosis-tb-in-cattle-in-great-britain/quarterly-tb-in-cattle-in-great-britain-statistics-notice-september-2022 ) which track trends since 1996 and are updated every quarter.

Below is the long-term graph from the latest quarterly update – these are updated quarterly and always available online to the public at no cost.

Note: From these graphs, you will see that Scotland has no bovine TB problem – they operate very strict risk-based trading of cattle (no purchase or movement of cattle from areas or herds with any history of bTB). Interestingly, this has not stopped one major farming trade lobby in Scotland calling on the Scottish government to cull badgers: their grounds (lacking bTB) are the unfounded unevidenced impact the species is claimed by some interests to have on the integrity of populations of financially valuable ground nesting game birds. Populations of any species can be boosted to levels which can never be achieved nor sustained by nature through the removal of all competitor and predatory species - avian or terrestrial. This is to all intents and purposes the farming of a preferred species: it certainly isn’t conservation.

You will also see that the results derived from the bTB control policy in Wales show a more rapid and more marked fall in past years compared to England over the same periods, despite no costly proactive or intensive culling of badgers, and cutting disease spread far earlier. Points for Wales.

What these graphs don’t highlight but do show is the initial higher slaughter rates in Wales – when you use a more accurate test, you will find more individuals with the disease you are testing for. This was very unpopular with some members of farming industry groups campaigning to boycott the tests. Had we not tested for Covid, it’s true we wouldn’t have found as many cases – would that have been better? Well, President Trump seemed to think so.

However, the Welsh government pressed ahead, and the unpopular use of the Gamma interferon identified a large hidden reservoir of disease in the Welsh national herd which will be mirrored in England. Many cattle, which using the old unreliable test [on average 85% reliable but ranging from 50-85%] which weren’t identified as infected, had previously been left in the herd, silently infecting clean cattle, spreading the disease on the farm, to neighbouring farms, through the slurry, into the soil, into other livestock and into wildlife. Not using the most accurate test available is a massive own goal. England continues to score that own goal in most counties most of the time. Points deducted from England. Points added for Wales.

Only Wales has had the cojones to test non bovine livestock without waiting for an outbreak of disease – but not systematically or regularly. One point to Wales. It remains a missed opportunity for biosecurity. Neither Wales nor England routinely test non bovine livestock – so owners of any infected animals essentially get a free pass while cattle owners must shoulder all the responsibility of surveillance and control for the whole livestock industry.

Sheep carry bovine, TB acting as a secondary host, and are routinely co-grazed with cattle. Camelids (llama, alpaca) carry bovine TB too; ditto farmed and wild deer. In Wales, one particularly persistent hotspot is an area into which deer were introduced as an ornamental addition to the landscape more than twenty years ago and the strain of identifiable disease in the area remains the same (conversation with Chief Vet team, Welsh Govt). To blame badgers there would be as absurd as to blame badgers for the outbreak in Cumbria, England ,when the strain of disease was identified as originating from cattle bought in from an infected herd in Northern Ireland. Actually, that is exactly what Defra did, culling the badgers.

Defra have never published a business case for lethal badger control (culling) as part of addressing bovine TB. The nearest thing to a published justification were papers and departmental statements making the case for cutting the cost of the compensation bill to taxpayers for cattle prematurely slaughtered as a result of bovine TB. On this basis alone, the cull has failed. The bill to taxpayers has risen year on year, overall by more than 20% since before the cull, with the number of cattle slaughtered in England remaining stubbornly hard to shift either as a percentage of the national herd or significantly as an absolute. Points deducted from England, and many tens of millions of pounds from everyone.

Proponents of the cull rather than the inconvenient bits of the science like to claim that no other country has addressed bovine TB without killing wildlife. Not true. Killing wildlife – even in England – has been recognised as a means of engaging with some in the farming industry for whom unless wildlife is in the firing line, co-operation on other measures is off the table. In New Zealand, the invasive non-native possum (being very widely culled for other reasons) was culled as part of bTB measures with very limited effect. What proponents don’t care to mention too often is that whole herds of cattle were culled in NZ when a reactor was found in order to clear out infection; rapid restocking was forbidden; or that ‘farmer led’ compensation arrangements means that compensation payments are decided locally by fellow farmers and it is not a given that a farmer will receive compensation at all if their peers judge them to have behaved poorly in terms of disease control.

It’s immensely hard to find anywhere else in the world to compare with the UK – nowhere else has the volume or frequency of cattle movements which our highly structured and systematised livestock industry has. Cattle movements (much like human social contact in Covid) is a major risk factor in the spread of bTB: but cattle movements are also how our very efficient industry is structured, and how our farmers earn their living, and we’re not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

More and more people like me make a point of only buying the produce of Welsh dairy and selected livestock farms because of the Welsh Government policy which we see as a significant improvement over its next-door neighbour.

We want to support farmers: we also want to support and protect our native wildlife including one of our oldest and most charismatic mammals, the badger.

Bovine TB isn’t about badgers. It’s about cattle and we must find ways to keep them safe and healthy.

What needs to come next?

The best approach across the UK would be a cattle vaccine, with a test which can readily tell the difference between a vaccinated beast and an infected one, so buyers know what they’re getting. That measure has been ten years away for the last twenty years – with investment in it slow and inadequate.

A vaccine exists, it’s the BCG one we had as kids – an attenuated live vaccine - and is in field trials in England (though it is testing ‘farmer acceptance’). No vaccine is 100% reliable, but with sufficient in the population vaccinated, accurate testing as part of surveillance, very high levels of reliability and assurance can be achieved. Certainly, very much higher than the English testing currently regime affords its farmers, wholesalers, and export markets.

Sure, the 70 year old skin test mandated in England tells you an animal hasn’t been vaccinated, but it can still only reliably tell you 50% to 85% of the time if the animal is carrying bTB. I’d be less than comforted if I were a buyer of cattle or carcasses knowing the reliability of the English testing regime; I’d certainly want to buy Welsh or Scottish cattle instead.

Importantly for the market, a test is required which can tell the difference between an animal infected with bTB and one vaccinated against bTB – a so called DIVA test. Woefully underfunded and under prioritised, including by the industry trade lobby groups for whom the gains would be enormous - which is a real head scratcher frankly. 

Actiphage technology (a new test) can reproducibly determine the presence of live bacteria from a blood sample and provide a highly specific and sensitive result within six hours. Importantly, it has been claimed that the test can also simply differentiate between the vaccine strain and a natural infection therefore potentially defining itself as a true DIVA test. The necessary official approval of this too lacks any sense of urgency by the Government and the UK industry.

Only focused effort on vaccinating cattle and post vaccination testing, actively called for by industry and NGOs alike, backed by Government decisiveness and investment will turn the tide on the disease once and for all.

The UK is world beating in vaccine and testing technology – as our performance in the Covid crisis showed. So, this isn’t beyond us - assuming we have the will.

Vaccinate cattle: it’s the way forward for the future of livestock farming first and foremost.

Further reading

Welsh Government bTB approach FAQs - https://www.gov.wales/bovine-tb-eradication-programme-frequently-asked-questions

Badgers of Witham Woods – Professor David MacDonald, formerly chair of the scientific advisory committee to Natural England, there is a chunk of the book devoted to Prof. MacDonalds time at Natural England advising Defra about the intensive badger cull. Note the enormous disease movements around the country over the decades, previous hotspots included the northeast of England, not the southwest of England.

The Fate of the Badger – Dr. Richard Meyer, a detailed account of the early years of MAFF’s attempts to identify the pathways of infection for bTB and methods for addressing the disease.