British farm chief studies Ireland’s TB success story
Britain’s Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has been studying Ireland’s achievement in disease control, Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney, has confirmed.
Mr Coveney said: “Addressing TB and brucellosis has been a real success story in the Department, so much so that my British counterpart, the UK secretary of state, Owen Paterson, spent one and a half days examining our TB programme, because the British want to learn from it. The UK is going in the opposite direction and that is a problem for us, because of Northern Ireland.”
A new study, titled ‘Bovine tuberculosis trends in the UK and the Republic of Ireland, 1995–2010’, published in the Veterinary Record, found the animal incidence of TB is up by 380% in England, by 190% in Wales, and by 74% in Northern Ireland. The animal incidence in Ireland fell by 32% in the same period.
Mr Coveney also said his department’s Bovine TB-eradication programme contains a wildlife strategy to limit the spread of TB from badgers to cattle.
Under this strategy, capturing is undertaken only in areas where an epidemiological investigation carried out by the department’s veterinary inspectorate found badgers were the likely source of infection, and capturing takes place under licence issued by the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.
Mr Coveney said: “Despite considerable research in both Ireland and the UK, no test on live badgers has proven efficacious in reliably detecting TB-infected badgers and thus it is not possible to determine whether a badger is infected with TB prior to culling.
“The culling programme is undertaken by trained Farm Relief Service contractors, as humanely as possible, and is monitored and supervised by staff from my department.”
Farm Relief Service staff label and identify the badger carcasses, but no further information is gathered at this point. Samples for culture are taken from half of all badgers annually, with a view to establishing the general level of infection in culled badgers. The badger carcasses are disposed of by rendering.
Mr Coveney said there had been an improvement in the bovine TB situation in Ireland since the introduction of an enhanced badger-removal programme in the early part of the last decade.
Cattle-herd incidence is down from 7.5%, in 2000, to 4.1%, in 2012. The number of TB reactors declined from 40,000 to 18,500 in the same period. This is the lowest recorded since the start of the TB-eradication programme in the 1950s. The incidence of TB in 2013 is running at 10% below levels recorded in 2012.
