Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-131)
26 MAY 2004
MR BEN
BRADSHAW, MR
ALICK SIMMONS
AND PROFESSOR
JOHN BOURNE
Q120 Mr Mitchell: Meanwhile, what happens
to the original accused who seems to me to be leaving the court
without a stain on his character, the badger? Professor Bourne's
statement that "claims that wholesale badger culling was
the answer to TB were `absolute tosh'", is a very political
statement. It does not say they do not bear any responsibility,
it says that these are the counts, cattle movements and other
factors. What share of responsibility do you assume that the badgers
bear in this?
Professor Bourne: There is no
doubt the badger is involved in disease transmission to cattle.
Equally, one cannot discount that we know that cattle transmit
the disease to badgers. The big conundrum is what does one do
about it? Reference has been made to Thornbury and to Southern
Ireland. In Thornbury, badger removal was complete over a six
year period using gassing techniques and the impact on cattle
TB was very dramatic, but it coincided with an improvement in
the diagnostic test and also there was a rigorous application
of diagnostic testing in Thornbury and the tuberculin test in
those days was used very differently from the way the tuberculin
test is used now. It was used as a herd test and there were a
large number of herd eliminations. That very rarely occurs now.
Only 300 cattle each year for the last two or three years have
been involved in whole herd slaughter. One has to be careful about
determining just what role elimination of the badger can make
to better controlling cattle TB. You are aware that in the trial
we are not moving towards elimination, it is based on sustainability.
I make the point about Australia where they had a TB problem in
cattle which in one state involved the wildlife reservoir, the
water buffalo, and they eliminated the water buffalo. In the other
states where they had TB and no water buffalo they could only
control the disease by rigid movement controls and improved diagnosis.
Undoubtedly there are lessons to be learned, I believe, from what
is going on in the Republic of Ireland and it would be wrong to
attempt scientifically to rubbish the work they are doing. We
are all awaiting with interest the outcome of their work. You
have to appreciate that the economic and environmental conditions
pertaining in Southern Ireland are totally different from those
in this country with respect to badger population, with respect
to how they are removing those badgers and the extent to which
they are doing so. It is chalk and cheese with what we are doing
in a sustainable way in Great Britain. That does not mean to say
that their results will not inform policy, I think they will and
I think they should. At the end of the day one has to accept,
as we accepted at the outset of our work, that badger culling
may not be a policy option in the future for a range of reasons
which does not eliminate the badger from the equation but it means
by focusing on the cattle issue you bring the disease under better
control and you tolerate what I anticipate would be sporadic incursions
of the disease into the cattle population from badgers and you
will have to accept that.
Q121 Mr Mitchell: That is a proper note
of scientific caution but, on the other hand, in the less scientific
world many of the farmers believe that the badgers are responsible.
Your statement was even contradicted at the Farmers' Union of
Wales by somebody who said we did not have this problem before
the badger became a protected species. If the farmers believe
that and they see a hiatus in policy, more research, scientific
caution, the triplet test is messed up, wait for a vaccine, wait
for Ireland, it is possible to assume that their reaction is,
"Government is going to do nothing, we are treading water,
let's go out and kill the bastards". That is going to be
an inevitable reaction. You cannot say, can you, that killing
them may not have produced the fall in the incidence that you
are commenting on today? Do we know about the scale in which killing
is going on? Do we know about the effects of all this caution
on the attitudes of the farmers?
Mr Bradshaw: Yes, we do. I think
it is quite important to remind ourselves, not least because of
the debate recently with some people suggesting that we should
just issue farmers licences willy-nilly to kill badgers, something
that has not been done by any Government since 1972, since badgers
were first protected, that there are more badgers being culled
under the proactive Krebs trials now than there were under the
so-called interim strategy that was pursued by the previous Government
and was so disastrous when we saw the biggest year-on-year rise
in TB. We know the numbers that are being killed because the Krebs
trial keeps very close records. The difference, of course, is
that they are being killed in the Krebs trials under very strictly
controlled scientific circumstances aimed to give you answers
to some of the questions that people like you and we have been
asking for years, whereas the previous culling was not based on
any such scientific basis and did not tell us anything about the
impact of killing badgers in a particular way on the spread of
TB.
Q122 Mr Mitchell: As Rumsfeld might have
said, there are no knowns and there are no unknowns. You do not
know how many the farmers are killing and just taking the law
into their own hands.
Mr Bradshaw: That is one of the
questions I have repeatedly asked Professor Bourne as to how robust
he believes the trials are. Perhaps he would prefer to answer
that himself.
Professor Bourne: The trials were
designed with the expectancy that there would be interference
and non-compliance from farmers. I find the level of support we
have had from the farming industry reassuring and that has held
even in the wake of recent reports, which I think create more
problems than help. Compliance from farmers has helped. We are
also concerned about problems from activists interfering with
trapping activity in trial areas, but of course we know about
that and that can be recorded and handled in a statistical way.
The one grey area is illegal culling but we recognised from the
outset that it would have to be on a massive scale for it to impugn
the results of the trial and there is no evidence at all that
it has occurred on a massive scale, although I do not doubt that
it has occurred. We see very clearly the difference in badger
population density between survey only areas, reactive areas and
proactive areas. The argument has been how accurate is an assessment
of badger population and we recognise it is not, this is why we
have advised Defra to focus so much resource on trying to answer
that question. Nonetheless, the data we have from surveying those
areas supports the fact that illegal culling on a wide scale is
not occurring.
Q123 Mr Wiggin: From what we have heard
today, and I am glad that the Minister was here earlier, the message
seems to me to be that we ought to be patient because the Irish
experiment is coming along and Professor Bourne will report. I
am just worried that we should be taking a slightly more layered
approach and we ought to be doing our best to do more perhaps.
We can cull the deer. We should perhaps take advantage of the
fact that cattle have passports. Putting an electric fence around
one's farm is something that one of the farmers in my constituency
did and it was not effective, unfortunately. There have been only
one or two comments on the size of the badger population, which
must have expanded considerably since badgers became protected,
which of course is not the same as deer because you can cull deer.
Of course, there is the Government's ability to incentivise farmers
to join in with the gamma-interferon test examples that you require.
From the point of view of somebody who wants to have cattle, unless
all of these things are being done it is quite alarming, there
is not a lot of hope that the Government can offer us at the moment,
or is that wrong?
Mr Bradshaw: I am not patient,
I am impatient. I think any Minister in this position whose Department
is spending £74 million a year, expected to be £90 million
this year, is going to be impatient to find the solution to it.
The problem that we have is one that often affects us if we are
trying to tackle a complex animal disease and that is to find
a cure and there are no magic wand overnight solutions to this.
If there were, this problem would have been solved a long time
ago. Deer are not protected; if farmers are worried about deer
they are perfectly entitled to cull them themselves. At the moment,
my Department is consulting on a deer management strategy of which
this may well be an element. One of the bits of research we are
funding is on TB in deer and it is a problem that we take extremely
seriously. My understanding of the badger population is that there
is evidence—I do not know whether Chris Cheeseman is still
here—that the population has actually fallen in the last
couple of years and this may or may not have some relationship
with the fall-off we have seen in the incidence of TB because
of the dry weather in the spring which has meant that the cubs
have starved. I am going to ask Alick to say something about incentivising
for the gamma-interferon because he has followed this right from
the beginning and I understand that there were financial incentives
that we dangled in front of farmers at the beginning, but I do
not know how successful they were. Would you like to say something
about that?
Mr Simmons: Right at the beginning
when we did the very first feasibility trial which was intended
to find out whether we could do it, because there were issues
to do with how you organise it and how you get the samples to
the laboratory and so forth, at the very early stages when we
had just recruited fewer than ten farms, and that was curtailed
by the foot and mouth disease epidemic, there were some incentives.
If we were to apply incentives now then probably it would need
to be on the basis of so much per head of animals tested. I see
no reason why we cannot consider that but, having said that, it
will come at a cost.
Q124 Mr Wiggin: Why do not you make it
an incentive because what farmers fear is that they will have
a greater cull? Why do you not increase, perhaps by a small percentage,
the amount of compensation base if there is a positive reactor
found? That way they will not be so frightened of actually losing
their stock.
Mr Simmons: There are a number
of reasons why farmers are worried about losing their stock. It
is not just the value of them that they worry about, it is the
genetic potential of the ones they lose and also—
Q125 Mr Wiggin: That is value as well,
of course.
Mr Simmons: Also, if it is a closed
herd they do worry about that sort of thing. In addition to that,
they worry about the value of the milk that is lost. Traditionally,
for a number of different reasons, and I am no lawyer so I am
not able to explain why, Government does not pay consequential
loss, so if we were to incentivise, in other words putting a lump
sum on top of an evaluation, then we would need to explore the
legal issues associated with that. Probably it would be simpler
to pay an element towards the labour costs of presenting the cattle.
Q126 Mr Wiggin: I think we agree that
this test is an effective test. Therefore, as the Minister is
so impatient, perhaps this is one of the areas where you could
be really effective quickly. There are not a huge number of impossibilities
to speak to farmers with cattle, therefore you can reach them,
you can be effective, you can offer different incentives based
on different difficulties. You could be incredibly proactive here
and it would not necessarily cost anything like the bill that
we are going to get.
Mr Simmons: I think one thing
we do need to be careful about is not so much the fact it is efficacious,
and I am convinced of that, that it will clear up infection in
herds more quickly, but one has to look at whether or not the
benefits of clearing up infection more quickly can be set against
the loss of cattle or other extra costs that are imposed on either
Government or farming as a result of doing those extra tests.
Mr Bradshaw: If I can help, I
think this is a good idea which I will look at more closely.
Q127 Mr Wiggin: Thank you.
Mr Bradshaw: Against the context
of the compensation rationalisation which we are looking at at
the moment because of the overpayments in Wales and other parts
of the country, it may well be that if that frees up resources
we can divert those resources into increasing incentives for farmers
to take part in the gamma-interferon pilot. If we can do that
legally and simply I think that very well may be a sensible idea.
Q128 Mr Wiggin: I am grateful for that.
Will you also extend that so that as many farmers as possible
can take part and you will not limit yourself to 600 herds? We
could be more effective if more people took part.
Mr Bradshaw: I think we would
want to strike a balance between the costs and the numbers that
we would need in order for it to tell us something useful.
Mr Simmons: We have confined it
to the counties in Wales—I cannot list those—and some
counties in the West Midlands: Hereford, Shropshire and Worcestershire.
We are consulting the State Veterinary Service at the moment as
to whether or not we can extend that into some of the high risk
areas in the South West down to Devon, Cornwall and so forth,
and that would increase the base from which we can draw candidate
herds.
Mr Wiggin: I was very keen for Hereford
and Worcester to be part of the trial period. What I have had
fed back from my farmers is that there is really nothing in it
for them to join in. Please find a way to make it worth their
while to join in and then I think you will find it easier. I am
slightly curious as to why Wales slipped into this because I think
in Wales agriculture is devolved, but we will not go there because
I know David wants to ask a question.
Q129 Mr Drew: You heard in the previous
questions I asked that I am interested in this idea of breeding
out bovine TB. We have got a national scrapie plan where we are
very clear that we presume you can remove scrapie over a long
period of time by genetic manipulation of the stock. I have always
been interested in this notion of trace elements, which I know
is seen to be off the wall, but we did learn when the Committee
went to New Zealand that they are exceedingly critical of our
livestock breeding in terms of the limited number of lactations
we now get from the modern dairy cow. They think that we have
bred a species of cows now that are not fit for the purpose. Why
do we not look at this idea? We know there are resistors out there,
why do we not give the time to see if we could breed them in,
maybe to be supported with vaccination in due course but we know
that is at least eight years away? Why are we not looking at these
measures? They are not going to fix it in the short run but they
just might be the answers in the longer run.
Professor Bourne: If I could respond
to that, Minister. You will recall that we did address this question
very carefully in a written response to ministers, I forget whether
it was in our second or third report. There are real problems
with doing this work simply because while there is some evidence
that indigenous African strains may have a degree of protection,
any experimental animal exposed to the disease succumbs, and it
is a question of experimental infectious dose. On the basis of
experimentation there is no evidence that there is absolute resistance.
There may be degrees of resistance but the factors influencing
that are so variable as to make it extremely difficult to pursue
experimentally. There is another problem, of course, in that the
other complication of this disease is the way it is controlled
by identifying an immune response to an M.bovis organism,
which is a crazy way to control a disease in fact. One is looking
for a naíve population of animals and one has to do this
on the basis that even with an animal with an immune response
you do not know whether it is protected, whether it is protected
now, whether it will still be protected tomorrow and whether that
animal will subsequently transmit disease, whether it will do
so tomorrow or in five years' time and so on and so on. These
are all related to the complexity of the disease and the complexity
of control. I would advise you to look at the detailed comment
we made about this experimental approach which does indicate very
clearly that to do this experimentally is virtually impossible.
It would be extremely expensive. New technology may emerge which
does identify genes associated with TB resistance but there is
no question of us having our hands on those at the moment and
that would, of course, come from laboratory studies which I know
are ongoing in relation to the control of human TB, so do not
give up hope completely on this although it is an extremely long
shot. We were aware at the time—this would have been three
years ago—that the Southern Irish geneticists were interrogating
their bull genetic database to see if they could find some way
of getting into this question and they have not reported. I can
only assume that they did not find a way of getting into that
database to provide useful data.
Mr Bradshaw: Can I just add to
that very briefly. Professor Bourne has outlined the scientific
difficulty of experiments on trace elements along the line that
Mr Drew recommends. It is possible that the results from the TB-99
survey may give some non-scientific but useful indication on breeds,
on feed, on geography and geology that we were not hitherto aware
of and, as I said, those results should be out in July.
Q130 Chairman: I want to try and draw
things to a conclusion. I want to go back to something Professor
Bourne said earlier on. I think he was hinting, and forgive me
if I did not understand entirely, that very localised culling
effectively did not work. One piece of evidence which the Committee
received was from two people who claim knowledge in this field,
a Dr Archie McDiarmid and Dr Lewis Thomas, who sent us a copy
of a letter which they sent to the Veterinary Record as
long ago as 12 April 2000 and the thesis at the heart of this
was localised control.[2]
They felt that if, in fact, you could keep the badger population
down this would effectively stop badgers migrating out of overpopulated
areas and their analysis was that if you allow local culling to
take place, modify the law to allow that to occur, in some way
this would be a preventative control mechanism. Were you aware
of those findings? Would you care to comment on them?
Professor Bourne: I was aware
of the findings, those two individuals are both friends of mine
and we have discussed this issue. All I can say is that reactive
culling, localised culling around breakdown farms in the way we
were able to do it, given the limits of sustainability and the
logistics of the operation, has demonstrated very clearly it has
no impact on the incidence of the disease in cattle, and I do
not think I can add to that.
Q131 Chairman: So the message to farmers
is do not take the solution into your own hands, back some of
the other measures which the Minister has outlined form the heart
of his new strategic investigation?
Professor Bourne: Better information,
of course, will come from the proactive trial which is still running
where we are removing badgers from a very much wider area, that
will be informative. Certainly at the moment the message from
the data we have is that localised culling is not going to help
the situation and, indeed, could make it worse. I go back to the
reactive cull findings, that while you would not put your life
on the line to say that reactive culling makes it worse, you probably
would bet your house, but you would probably put your life on
the line to say it does not make it better.
Mr Bradshaw: Can I just add something
very briefly to that. That was also the experience of the disastrous
interim strategy.
Chairman: Gentlemen, thank you very much
indeed. I think this is a subject to which the Committee will
from time to time inevitably want to return. You have given us
some interesting insights for the future; a lot of food for thought.
The evidence will be published on our website in due course. Minister,
if there are any further points that you feel should be clarified
before we formally publish the results of these deliberations
we would be very happy to receive them. Thank you not only for
coming and answering our questions but also for taking the time
and trouble to come and listen to what others said on the subject,
it is appreciated. Thank you very much.
2 Not printed.
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