Farmers call into question the Bovine TB vaccination - Cowsmo

Farmers call into question the Bovine TB vaccination

Up to six cattle farms on the West Country National Trust estate that has been vaccinating badgers since 2011 have gone down with bovine TB, calling into question the policy of vaccination without culling.

One tenant of the trust – who supports its vaccination policy “100 per cent” – said this week that it was not possible to eradicate the disease without a policy to also cull sick badgers.

Organic dairy farmer Jon Kittow said he has been forced to clean out his herd of bTB infected or suspected animals six times in 14 years – and still the disease kept coming back.

“We are a completely closed herd, we’ve spent tens of thousands on fencing, we have our own transport and there is no contact with other livestock. When Defra come onto the farm after a TB breakdown we tick every box. The only place the TB could have come from is the wildlife,” he said.

“What the National Trust has been doing with its vaccination programme is very important – but it is only going to work if you take out the infected wildlife too.”

Mr Kittow milks 150 cows and has around 250 young stock on his National Trust tenanted farm, producing organic milk. But he says the scourge of bTB has made it increasingly difficult to farm successfully.

“Increasingly, as a business, we have to plan for failure,” he said. “Every time my cows go out they are having to dodge a bullet – the bullet that they might get TB,” he said.

Alex Raeder of the National Trust, who has been leading the four-year vaccination trial on 20 square kilometres of the Killerton Estate, in Devon, said he had huge sympathy for the farmers hit by the disease, who he has known personally for many years.

“We really understand the personal impact, emotionally and commercially, in relation to TB breakdowns in the herd,” he said. “What the trust has been trying to do is something practical about the problem. It would be most unfortunate if the conclusion was that it doesn’t work and culling is better.”

But Mr Raeder said he did not think that was the case, although he agreed with Mr Kittow that vaccination alone would not eradicate bovine TB in cattle.

“We would agree absolutely that if you are really going to get on top of TB you have to address it from as many angles as possible.” But he stopped short of advocating culling. The trust nationally has remained uncommitted on the issue, although its ruling council voted against a motion to ban any cull on trust land.

Mr Raeder said he would like to take the whole focus of the debate around eradicating TB away from the badger. “Most sources seem to accept the badger is a significant but relatively minor vector of the disease. I would point to Wales where really stringent cattle to cattle movement controls have helped to reduce TB by 50 per cent since 2009,” he said.

The National Trust at Killerton pioneered badger vaccination from 2011 in order to demonstrate if it could be done practically and cost-effectively. Costs have fallen dramatically from the initial £80,000 the programme cost in the first year and 539 badgers have been vaccinated on the estate.

Mr Raeder said he also hoped that by undertaking the work – just after the first injectable vaccination was licensed and before the pilot badger culls began in Somerset and Gloucestershire – they had helped to raise the profile of vaccination.

The Government is now supporting vaccination programmes in the so-called “edge areas” outside of the South West bTB hotspot.

The trust reports: “We are working with the AHVLA on some statistical evidence on numbers of badgers vaccinated by the project against the total population – we are hoping to prove very high penetration rates on this – from which we can infer that we should have established good ‘herd immunity’ in the badger population on the estate and should therefore reduce the likelihood of badgers and the estate transferring TB infection to cattle.

“However, it will not be possible to say this will incontrovertibly lead to a reduction in bovine TB on the estate.

“In addition, we are hoping to build on the legacy of knowledge that has been built up of the estate and its badgers by NT and AHVLA staff and our tenants to establish Killerton as a training site for individuals and groups to be able to train as vaccinators, as interest in vaccination of badgers grows as another viable tool to deal with TB in wildlife and as a result of recent Government policy announcements regarding the use of vaccination in the edge area of the spread of the disease out of its stronghold in the West Country and Wales.

“In establishing such a training centre at Killerton we would hope to maintain the levels of vaccination we have achieved with our won investment over the last four years.”

The National Trust said it stood by the vaccination trials, revealing it had injected 47 badgers in the first year of trials in 2011, 104 in 2012, 202 in 2013 and 186 this year.

It believes it is avoiding vaccinating the same badger twice in any one year by taking a tuft of hair as a marker, though the charity concedes it may be vaccinating the same mammals in consecutive years.

The results from the trial will be known in 2015, once the four years are up.

The badgers at Killerton are trapped in cages baited with peanuts and injected with the vaccine. A separate trial of an oral badger vaccine is also taking place on the estate. It would dramatically cut the costs of the operation.

Killerton has 18 tenant farmers producing a range of products, from awarding winning beef to organic dairy products.

Source:Western Daily Press

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