Question: Because you work in the field of animals tranferring diseases - do you agree that the planned badger cull to stop bovine TB will work?

Emma Trantham answered on 24 Jun 2012:

Ok this is a very good question. Such a good question in fact that I’m afraid I’m going to give it a rather long answer.

The short answer is that yes, I tend to support the badger cull and think it will have a broadly positive effect on bovine TB. I don’t think it will /stop/ it, but I think it is better than doing nothing.

Onto the long answer…

There was a study done in the UK some years ago called the Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT) which found that in areas where there was lots of bovine TB culling the badgers did reduce the number of herds that had a TB breakdown (a TB breakdown is where a cow in a TB-free herd is diagnosed with TB). The initial results looked like there was only a small reduction but follow up research into the same areas suggests the reduction may actually be larger than first thought.

(The study did also find that in areas next to the culling areas the number of cattle TB cases increased. The scientists suggested that this may be due to the culling disturbing the badgers and so they moved into neighbouring areas. This increase seemed to reduce over the years but it is why there is a lot of talk about “geographical boundaries” of the cull areas. The idea is that if the cull areas are bordered by rivers, major roads and coastlines then the badgers won’t be able to spread to other areas when they are disturbed.)

As bovine TB can infect people, as it can also cause disease in cattle, badgers and other wildlife, and as the number of cattle cases seem to be increasing I think it is very important that we try to reduce the numbers of infection *nowMATOMO_URL We don’t have an effective vaccine (and there are other problems with vaccination), all we really have available is culling and as the RBCT showed that culling can be effective I think we have to try it.

The culls will need to be carried out consistently and repeated over several years to be effective and it is also important that they are carried out humanely and continually reassessed to check that they are working. If we find out they are not working then we should definitely stop.

Ideally scientists will be able to develop a test that would allow us to easily and accurately tell which badgers are infected and which badgers aren’t and then culling could be targeted a bit more effectively but until then the best we can do is blanket culling in the areas of the UK where there are high levels of TB infection in cattle and badgers.

This is a huge topic and so you or others reading this may well have more questions – please feel free to ask them and I’ll answer as best as I can.