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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 638-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee
Wednesday 26 May 2004 PROFESSOR DOUG YOUNG, MR ALICK SIMMONS and DR CHRIS CHEESEMAN MR BEN BRADSHAW MP, PROFESSOR JOHN BOURNE and MR ALICK SIMMONS Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 131
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee on Wednesday 26 May 2004 Members present Mr Michael Jack, in the Chair Mr Colin Breed Mr David Drew Patrick Hall Mr Austin Mitchell Diana Organ Alan Simpson David Taylor Paddy Tipping Mr Bill Wiggin ________________ Witnesses: Professor Doug Young, Fleming Professor of Medical Microbiology at Imperial College of Medicine, Defra's Bovine TB Vaccine Adviser, Mr Alick Simmons, Head of the Veterinary Endemic and Zoonoses Division, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and Dr Chris Cheeseman, Team Leader, Woodchester Park badger establishment, Central Science Laboratory, examined. Chairman: Can I welcome to the Committee Professor Doug Young, Fleming Professor of Medical Microbiology at Imperial College of Medicine, and Defra's bovine TB vaccine adviser. He is accompanied by Mr Alick Simmons, Head of the Veterinary Endemic and Zoonoses Division, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and Dr Chris Cheeseman, the Team Leader, Woodchester Park badger establishment, Central Science Laboratory. The reason we are here today is because I think we feel, probably like everybody else connected with bovine TB, a deep sense of frustration that we still seem to be no nearer cracking this problem of having a strategy that will deal with the spread of TB and against a background where farmers in those areas where TB is effectively rampant are deeply troubled and frightened and those who are bordering on areas where currently TB has yet to spread are also very frightened indeed about the consequences to their businesses and lots has been done but nothing has actually seemingly delivered a solution. One of the main things that we would be grateful if you as experts in the field would concentrate on in responding to the questions that we will ask is to update us on some of the latest work that has been going on and try to help us forward on the agenda that says if Krebs et al is Plan A and it does not work, what is going to be Plan B. I would like to start our questioning this afternoon by inviting Diana Organ to make some comments about Somerset. Q1 Diana Organ: The map of bovine TB incidence in Great Britain in 1997 and again in 2002 is deeply depressing in that there has been huge growth in the incidence of the disease. One thing that I noted from the map is that there seems to be something happening in Somerset. Somerset is west of England, it is grassland economy and it obviously has dairy and beef cattle in quite substantial numbers. Whereas in my area, in Gloucestershire, it is getting worse and worse and worse, there seems to be something positive occurring in Somerset. Has anybody looked at what is happening in Somerset? Have there been studies about the husbandry there or about the badger population there, something that might give us a clue to help with our policy? Mr Simmons: Mr Chairman, perhaps it might be better if I started off here. I happen to live in Somerset and my previous post was Divisional Veterinary Manager for Somerset and Dorset, so I happen to know the area quite well. As Mrs Organ says, there is foci of infection in West Somerset and also a patch along the edge of the Mendips where it borders with what used to be the county of Avon and there is also a small patch of disease along the Polden Hills, but as I am sure you know from the geography of Somerset, there are large tracks of Somerset which have got very low lying areas as well. Whilst I could not be certain about this, I believe one of the reasons for it is that the type of agricultural system and the habitat for wildlife on the Somerset Levels and Moors is very different from the areas I have just mentioned and also very different from most of Gloucestershire where the habitat for badgers and the type of grazing for cattle is very different. Q2 Diana Organ: So it is a geographic reason, it is to do with the badger habitat rather than the practices of the dairy or beef farmers, that is why we do not have incidence of TB so prolifically there as we have in other parts of the West Country? Dr Cheeseman: In terms of badger habitat the Somerset Levels is not very good habitat. There are badgers there but it is not prime habitat, so I would expect the badger density in that part of the world to be lower than it is on the Quantocks or the Mendips and certainly it is a lot lower than it is in the Cotswolds. My colleague is right about the farming practice, there is a different type of farming on the Levels and it is a fairly unique system in a way. I would guess that there are a lot of variables which are different in that part of the world. One of the things that intrigues us about this problem is that there are some parts of the country where the disease is notably absent in both badgers and cattle and there are some parts of the country where the disease seems to be absent in badgers although it is present in cattle and there are anomalies like this which give us hope for understanding it better. We do not fully understand why this is the case at the moment, but if we could get to the bottom of that we may be nearer a solution. Q3 Diana Organ: You said there are some places where there is incidence of the disease in cattle but not in the badger. Could you tell me where that might be? Dr Cheeseman: I cannot specifically tell you. Q4 Diana Organ: I wonder if we could have a note about that because that is quite interesting. We have got the disease exhibiting in cattle and we have to look at why it is being transmitted to cattle and how, but it is not in the natural wildlife of the badgers. Dr Cheeseman: That is true. Historically Somerset was a county where the prevalence of disease in badgers has been extremely low. I think that picture has changed in the last few years in that on the edges of Exmoor there is now a disease problem in both badgers and cattle where there was not perhaps ten or 15 years ago. There is something different there and it could be a genetic immunity in the badgers possibly. There are a number of possible reasons that we simply do not know. Chairman: If you look at the Sanga Institute website, when they were doing their work on genomics in this area I was pulled up somewhat short where they said, "It is more likely that man gave Tuberculosis to cattle", so it is in fact all down to us. I hope nobody is suggesting that we get culled in this particular operation. Q5 Mr Drew: Given all the negatives that we started with in regard to this particular issue, can you give us some positive news? You have to advise the Minister and he is sat behind you and he will be listening. Can you give us some positive news on what has been learned that can begin to help us deal with the key issues of transmission and eventually causation and can help us move forward? It may be that each one of you will want to say a bit about your area. I think we want to move away - that is the whole point of today - from some of the stereotypical positions that people traditionally take up on these areas. Dr Cheeseman: I will try and start to answer that question with a little bit of positive news. I have talked to this Committee before about husbandry and the fact that I feel that the farming industry perhaps could do more to reduce the risks. We published a study very recently where we found that badgers do indeed frequent farm buildings to find food and, not surprisingly, it is more often in dry weather when their natural food supplies are not available. The most recent work has demonstrated that the frequency of visits by badgers to buildings and cattle feed supplies is much greater than we ever really thought. These are high risk situations around the farms and it is often fairly simple to prevent badgers gaining access to these places. I would say there is a little glimmer of hope in that we might persuade the industry, although I am not quite sure how, that it certainly needs to be taken much more seriously by farmers. Some farmers are good on their bio-security and husbandry but others are not, you see plenty of scruffy farms around. There is a lot that could be done to reduce the risk of badgers getting into these buildings and gaining access to the cattle feed and leaving their excretory products there, which are an extremely high risk to the cattle. I would say there is a glimmer of hope on improvements in farm husbandry that could contribute to a reduction in the risk. Q6 Chairman: You have not got any hard and fast evidence to say that given the state of bovine TB you can expect an X per cent reduction if you followed your line of thinking. Dr Cheeseman: That is perfectly true, Chairman, and I will put my hands up and admit that is a weakness. A lot of the advice that we give the farmers is really down to common sense. Certainly, if I was a farmer I would shut doors and I would keep feed stores closed to wildlife because it makes sense. I cannot say to a farmer that if he takes these measures he will reduce his risks by 50 per cent. You can understand that to do that we would have to mount a trial along the lines of the culling trial to establish what the actual risks are and by how much we might expect to reduce them. To get that information would be another huge trial. What we are doing at the moment is basing our advice on our scientific studies of badger behaviour. We have mounting evidence that this is a serious problem and it really does need to be taken much more seriously by the industry. Q7 Mr Drew: I would just like to hear from the other two participants about what they could give us as positive news that could move us in a direction that we might want to go. Professor Young: At the time of the Krebs Report Plan B was a vaccine and people have been working very hard in laboratories on vaccines. Vaccines for TB have proven extremely difficult. We do not have a good vaccine for the human disease. It is very challenging. It is right at the edge of our scientific understanding to work out how to make a vaccine. What progress there has been we can split into two: we can think of vaccines in badgers and we can think of vaccines in cattle. In badgers what has been shown recently in the Republic of Ireland is that the BCG vaccine, which is the vaccine that we use in humans, has a protective effect against TB challenge in badgers in captivity and that is positive progress. To know whether that is really going to be a useful weapon in controlling the spread of TB in badgers is several steps down the road, but we are on a forward projectary with that. On the other side would be cattle. In the past we have tried BCG vaccination in cattle and that has not been sufficient to control the disease. There is a glimmer of interest at what has generally been tried, which is BCG in fully grown cattle and there is some evidence that perhaps if we use BCG in neonatal cattle, so cattle in the first few days of life, which is the way that we use it predominantly for humans, there might be some use of BCG as a cattle vaccine. People have been working very hard to make new improved vaccines both in human and against animal TB and again in the laboratory and in experimental situations we do have vaccination protocols which are better than BCG now. These generally involve BCG with something on top of that in addition, but again the story stops there. At the moment it is like the badgers, inside our experimental systems we are saying we are making progress, we can see something that means we might be moving in a forward direction, but we need to try those in field settings and see whether they really have got a significant impact on the real disease situation. For both of them I can say that things have been positive in the lab at the experiment level. We are now at the stage of trying these out in the real world. Q8 Mr Wiggin: I am very curious about this because I think you said BCG in adult cattle was not effective. Professor Young: There has been a series of trials and, a little bit like the human trials, in some of them it has looked reasonably effective, we have maybe got a 60 or 70 per cent reduction in disease, but in other ones it has been completely ineffective. Q9 Mr Wiggin: Does that mean that you take the adult cow, you vaccinate it and then it still develops the disease? Professor Young: You would then look again a year or so later. So you would vaccinate half your cows and not the other half and then you count who gets the disease over the next couple of years and they still got diseased. Q10 Mr Wiggin: Obviously cattle all have passports now. The potential to track cattle, particularly ones that are not for export - and I think that is the area where we are vulnerable - is much easier now than it has been before. What I was wondering is two-fold. First of all, if you are a farmer who is worried how can you get your herd into a trial? Potentially the protocols, BCG plus, may well be the solutions that they need. How can I get my cow in there? Secondly, what sort of financial advantage is there to any company developing these vaccines to make sure that we can buy them over the counter, or will be able to support them financially? Finally, what support would you expect from the Government? Professor Young: I will start with the first one which was your idea of farmer Smith who wants to get his cattle into a trial. Really in the short term I do not think farmer Smith is going to be involved. Those previous trials on BCG have been mainly carried out in places where you do not have a test and slaughter policy. Although it looks very bad to us in terms of the amount of bovine TB we have got in this country, the actual number of cattle coming down with disease is pretty small when you are thinking about doing a clinical trial to see whether that vaccine is going to work or not. One of the problems about moving these forward into any kind of trial is to find a situation where we have a high enough incidence that within a reasonably short period of time, with a manageable number of animals, we would really be able to see whether the vaccine works or not. One of the issues that we are wrestling with at the moment is how we can move it forward realistically to find out whether these vaccines are working in a real life situation and it is going to have to be some kind of focused situation where you either accumulate reactor cattle in one place or you go to some part of the world where you do not have a test and slaughter policy, but there are difficulties in doing that trial. Q11 Chairman: Can you just explain to me as a humble observer the scene? You said a moment ago that to crack TB in people was very difficult, it was right at the limits of our science. Searching for this vaccine is a bit like looking for the Holy Grail. People have been talking about it just over the horizon for as long as I can remember this problem being here. Why is it so difficult? Is it that you do not know the science or you have not got enough money to crack the problem or something else? Professor Young: Robert Gough was the person who discovered mycobacterial tuberculosis and the first thing he did was to make a vaccine. So he discovered a vaccine very quickly and that proved not to work. It is more than 100 years ago we have been failing to make vaccines. We have still failed to make them in humans. The BCG vaccine we have used will control certain forms of the disease in humans but it is not controlling the real problem of TB in humans. It is the science of it we do not understand, it is very complicated and this little bacterium interacts with our immune system and it seems to understand our immune system rather better than we do. We do not understand fully the immune response. We cannot identify which particular part of our immune system it is that would control this bacterium, we still have not cracked that for humans or for cattle. Q12 Chairman: Just take me forward a little bit. You keep saying it is too difficult, we might never ever understand it. If we look at the genes sequencing exercise that has been carried out and having read all this wonderful stuff about it, it sounded as though you were beginning, as far as M.bovis was concerned, to have some understanding of it. How far down the track has this exercise taken us and how much further down the track have we got to go? Professor Young: You keep going down until you have got 4,000 genes. One of these 4,000 might be the magic bullet that we want to hit. Over the last five or ten years, more in the context of human TB vaccine development, people have tested literally hundreds of vaccine candidates based on using these genetic tools. What we have done is tested on small animals, on mice and guinea pigs, we have got various candidates that work. What we have now moved to in the human field is very much like the situation I explained in badgers and cattle where we are now moving the best of those candidates into human clinical trials and those are extremely expensive. The latest funding in this area was $100 million from the Gates Foundation just to move some of these candidates into human trials. We do not know if they are going to work in humans. Q13 Chairman: Let us hope heroically that one of these is a winner. How long would it be before you would be confident as a scientist to say "That's the one. We can use it in cattle successfully"? Professor Young: Your first clinical trial to see whether your vaccine works or not is going to be a period of two to three years just to give the animals time to develop the disease. So for each run through of your test candidate you are talking now about a three to five year time-frame by the time you have done all of that. If the first one that I took was brilliantly successful then in five years' time I would be telling you "Okay, we now look like we can move this into larger scale trials". Q14 Chairman: How long from the largest scale trial --- Professor Young: --- before you would have a commercially viable vaccine that you would be making money with? You would need to think another five years as you scaled up these things. So you are still talking ten years as the optimistic scenario. Mr Wiggin: Is there a market even? Q15 Chairman: You talked about $100 million from the Gates Foundation. What kind of sums of money are we talking about to complete the process you have just described? Professor Young: I do not know. In humans we would talk about things like half a billion dollars, that sort of amount would be realistic for making a vaccine candidate, but the safety issues and testing are probably more expensive in humans. Q16 Chairman: You are telling us from the scientific standpoint that we are looking at possibly up to eight years from now and possibly half a billion dollars to get to the stage where you might have a potential winner. So we are looking at 2013 as a possible date, are we not? Professor Young: Yes. Q17 Paddy Tipping: This is in humans? Professor Young: Yes. These are the numbers that we use in the human field. I do not know whether Defra could help me with any realistic numbers for cattle. Mr Simmons: The properties of a vaccine for cattle I would venture to say would probably be expected to be less rigorous than the properties for a human vaccine. What we are looking for with a cattle vaccine is something that reduces pathology or, if we are lucky, eliminates it and also reduces transmission between cattle. A number of the vaccines that are used and already licensed for veterinary medicine at the moment do not have a desperately high efficacy but they still work in a flock or a herd situation. I would also suggest that the property of the vaccine will dictate the policy rather than the other way round. Q18 Mr Breed: Mr Simmons, in the information that Diana referred to earlier it appears that in the south-west in 1992 about 1.8 per cent of the herds registered for testing reactors were found and in 2002 this had gone up to six per cent, so over three times the number, during which time of course we have had the celebrated trials and then we had the Godfray report followed by some changes to the badger culling trial. Bearing in mind what has just been said about the rising cost of compensation which is now reaching astronomic sums, how much higher is it going to get before you in Defra actually call it a day on trials and everything else and actually start to tackle the major problem? Mr Simmons: The strategy document which we are consulting on at the moment sets out a variety of ways forward and seeks views from a variety of stakeholders, and we have been through a series of regional meetings where we have been asking the very sort of questions you have just asked and the intention is to try and reach some sort of consensus on a way forward. We have done predictions which show that if the most recent rate of increase was to continue then we would be in very deep trouble indeed simply because the disease would be probably in most cattle herds within the country, but I think that tends to take no account of the biological factors, the geographical factors and the husbandry factors that clearly do limit spread in the same way that I was explaining how I feel that spread has been limited within Somerset. We will reach a period when the increase will tend to level out or even start to reverse and I would say there is the faintest glimmer of that at the moment. Q19 Mr Breed: On the map that we have in front of us it would be easier to demonstrate those areas that do not have it rather than those areas that do. Forgive my suspicious mind, but the figures stop in 2002. When are we going to see 2003 figures bearing in mind we are in 2004? Mr Simmons: The 2003 figures are on the web but they are not mapped yet. Q20 Mr Breed: So I cannot work out the percentage increase that we have got in the south-west over and above where it was in 2002? Mr Simmons: There has been a slight decrease - admittedly these are very much provisional figures - in the first three months of 2004 in comparison with the first three months of 2003. Q21 Mr Breed: That is possibly because those that have decided to go out of milk or have been driven out of milk by TB and other factors have come off the radar and those that have remained have enabled you to show a slight decrease in the percentage. Mr Simmons: The testing effort during those three months in terms of number of cattle tested are comparable, it is a little over two million in both cases. What I think is important is that drawing comparisons between the current position and one or two or three years ago is extremely difficult because of the major disruption caused by Foot and Mouth Disease. We have now have recovered almost completely from that in terms of the management of the epidemic and therefore we are now seeing the benefits of that and there appears to be a slight decrease, but I would emphasise that that decrease is in the very early days yet and one would not wish to say that that is the beginning of a long-term trend without several months or possibly even one or two years more data. Q22 Mr Breed: Does the Department expect to wait until the Krebs trials are completed before it decides on a future policy? Is it going to stick it out to the very end, bearing in mind all the delays and all the other aspects, or is it going to make some declaratory policy before the official end of the Krebs trials? Mr Simmons: As a Department we are committed to working in partnership with the various different stakeholders we have to work with and that includes the farming community, those with an interest in wildlife, consumers, etcetera. We have been working with them to develop this strategy. We are about to complete the consultation exercise and then we will start developing a strategy with, where appropriate, further consultation. What I can say is that the intention is to have a framework to develop a longer-term strategy based on the culling trial results. So the framework will already be in place prior to the results of the trial becoming available. Q23 Mr Breed: So the results are not driving the framework, the framework is going to be developed and, no matter what the figures are or what the results are, the framework is there for implementation? Mr Simmons: One can make a number of predictions about the results of the proactive elements of the trial: they could make the disease worse, they could make it better or they could make it stay the same and, depending on those results, we can develop a framework for dealing with it. We need to be in a position to be able to act on those as soon as possible. The other point I would like to make is that in addition to that we have firm proposals for short-term options which we propose to start implementing shortly once we have finished the consultation exercise and those are mainly to do with reducing the risk of spread via the cattle movements from the badly affected areas of the country to the less affected areas of the country. Chairman: I am sure we will come on to that. Q24 Mr Drew: Given that even in the worst breakdowns there are always cattle that demonstrate resistance to bovine TB, is there not some merit at least in thinking of an equivalent to the national scrapie plan where we try and breed bovine TB out of the cattle stock and indeed maybe in due course away from badgers? Professor Young: I think that is certainly an interesting concept. At the moment we are involved in a study in Ethiopia where we are trying to pin down the circumstantial evidence that suggests that cattle that were originally domesticated in the Indian subcontinent are apparently more resistant to TB than the kind of Friesian cattle that we use here. Nobody has ever really done the basic research to tie that down and look at the cattle genetics of it. We are doing a study in Africa at the moment which we are hoping will look into that to try and see if we can work out the genetic basis for differential resistance to M.bovis. If we could do that, I think that would be a very interesting study. Q25 Chairman: That is another area that you want to look at. I presume you have not got any money for that? Professor Young: No. We are asking the Wellcome Trust to support us with a little bit of money for that. Q26 Chairman: Not the Government? Professor Young: This is related to the problems that people have in Ethiopia. In Ethiopia they are bringing in Holstein Friesians to increase their milk yield and we are very concerned that that will also increase their bovine TB problem. Q27 Chairman: We have just had a question about all the work you have got to do on vaccines. Now we have had a new line of inquiry looking at possibly TB resistant cattle. Given a free hand what else would you like to look at? Professor Young: What we are dealing with here is this interface between fundamental research and putting things into practical policy and I think what is interesting in the context of bovine TB vaccines is to try and take the top of this basic fundamental research tree and try and move that into some kind of practical intervention. When you go back down beyond that and you say what do we want to understand about basic biology of infection with TB and so on the list is endless. Q28 Mr Wiggin: You said field trials in the UK did not work because we did not keep the cattle long enough, is that right? Professor Young: I think that is going to be a problem, yes. If you had a vaccine, how would you know it had worked or not? Chairman: Let us try and contain our enthusiasm for a moment and stick to this area of general science and vaccination. Q29 Paddy Tipping: Can I pick up a point that Dr Cheeseman was making earlier on which was that in the short-term bio-security measures are the way forward and I think Mr Simmons confirmed that around cattle movement. That is the only game in town just now, is it not? Mr Simmons: That is right. Dr Cheeseman: I would say that there is more to be done. We are actually in the middle of some research on investigating farm husbandry and trying to pin down the risk factors. At the end of that research I hope we will be in a better position to say to farmers that these are the measures that they can easily take living in the real world. We would not recommend anything that is either impractical or too expensive. Q30 Paddy Tipping: So you are saying to farmers there are things that they can do to reduce the risk? Dr Cheeseman: Yes. Q31 Paddy Tipping: Why are farmers not doing this? Dr Cheeseman: I think perhaps there is a need for us to be more proactive in disseminating this information and we have been talking about how we can possibly do this. I speak regularly to groups of farmers. I believe it is an important function of a research scientist to communicate the findings to the people that matter and we do this whenever we can. Defra has it in mind to add the recommendations that we are making into the demonstration farms and attending shows and functions where the farming community can be reached, so it is a PR job as well as a research exercise. Q32 Paddy Tipping: Why are farmers writing to me and saying that this is a load of rubbish? Dr Cheeseman: I get very depressed by that sentiment. Q33 Paddy Tipping: They say we ought to be shooting the badgers. Why is that the dominant theme at the moment? Dr Cheeseman: There is nobody here from the NFU to answer. I do see farmers and I know their feelings. Sometimes it is put to me that these measures are impractical. Well, shutting a door is not impractical, putting roller shuttered doors in front of feed stores is not impractical and indeed making feed troughs in the open field inaccessible to wildlife is not impractical. It may involve a cost. I can remember having a conversation with a farmer recently who said exactly these things to me, he said it is all too expensive and you cannot demonstrate that it is going to work. He had just finished telling me that his string of breakdowns had cost him in excess of £100,000 and I put it to him that the expenditure of maybe a few thousand or maybe even a couple of tens of thousands would be a good investment and I think he conceded that I had a point. Q34 Paddy Tipping: Mr Simmons, perhaps you could remind us of what the cost of compensation TB annually is running at at the moment? Mr Simmons: In 2003/04 compensation is £34.4 million. Q35 Paddy Tipping: So these are big sums of money that we are paying out and I think what you are saying to us, Dr Cheeseman, is that by better husbandry, better fencing, better security measures you could certainly reduce the risk, is it not? Dr Cheeseman: Yes. Q36 Paddy Tipping: Professor Young, you talked to us a bit about vaccination. For 12 years whilst I have been an MP people have been telling me that a vaccine is ten years away. Just help me, where are we now? Professor Young: We normally use this phrase ten to 15 years just to protect ourselves. Q37 Paddy Tipping: You have got three years left then! Professor Young: The Chairman put it as eight years which I thought was very delicate. My most optimistic colleagues working on a human TB vaccine say that they will have a vaccine ready in seven years and that is based on this sort of scenario. People ask how long physically it takes you to do a trial. Well, if everything works well you are talking about seven to eight years. Q38 Paddy Tipping: So you are confident about the science? Professor Young: We are not confident about the science. We have a lot of scientific uncertainty. We are working right at the edge of our knowledge. We are trying our best and if we are right in our guesses then we are talking about seven to eight years, but, no, do not take the message as I am confident in the science. I am confident we are doing our best in science, but we are not working from a solid knowledge base where we just say it is a technology, we just have to take known fact A and translate it into known product B, we are not at that stage. Q39 Paddy Tipping: If you wanted to extend the frontiers of your knowledge do you need some more money? Professor Young: Always. Q40 Paddy Tipping: How much more do you need? Professor Young: An infinite amount. Q41 Mr Wiggin: The Minister is listening! Professor Young: We have got to decide where exactly our frontier is here. Are we going to try and fill in the whole gap of knowledge in biology? That is where you need infinite amounts of money. What we need to do is select which are the key areas of biology that we really want to try and advance on. Q42 Paddy Tipping: Put a cost on them. If you cannot do it now, will you write to us? We are spending all this money in compensation. Farmers are suffering tragically. Why do we not produce the money to do this research? Professor Young: I could not give you a number off the top of my head. Dr Cheeseman: I would like to counsel a little caution regarding vaccines as some kind of panacea, I have seen this before. If I can return to your theme of perhaps a little bit of optimism but tint it with some other findings that I think you need to take on board because if we make it our goal to have a vaccine you have got to remember certain things and this is where research is being done. I think all it does is illustrate the complexity of the issue. We have just published a paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology which uses a mathematical model to try and detect what will happen if we vaccinate badgers. It uses perfectly legitimate parameters that we have generated from our studies and it makes reasonable assumptions about the efficacy of vaccines and the likely uptake rates that we would achieve in reality. One of the main findings is that the model indicated that the vaccination of badgers is a viable alternative to badger culling for the control of TB in cattle. I think that is a positive note, but you have to remember that although we do have a reservoir of disease in badgers, another piece of work that we have recently completed illustrates that we have quite a large pool of disease in deer. If you are going to vaccinate one wildlife reservoir you need to think about what is going to happen if you do not tackle the others. We found in a sample of several hundred deer 4.4 per cent prevalence in Fallow deer; that is quite high. That is what we found in badgers when we first started looking. We have also found disease in Row deer and Muntjak deer. Muntjak and Row are spreading, both those species are prolific and extending their range quite dramatically across Britain. It is no good just thinking that we can vaccinate badgers and ignore the fact that we may have other wildlife reservoirs. Q43 Paddy Tipping: I agree with that, vaccinating badgers is not going to be an easy task. It is far easier to vaccinate cattle. Surely that is the area that we ought to be working on. Professor Young: The problem is it would be easier in terms of getting the vaccine into the animal, but in terms of what the vaccine has to do in badgers compared to what it has to do in cattle, in badgers it may be sufficient to have a vaccine that reduces the level of disease so that they are not transmitting it, but in cattle we probably would not be happy to have a cow with just a little bit of TB. So the scientific challenge of what the vaccine does is tougher in cattle compared to in badgers. Q44 Paddy Tipping: My final question is about the international situation. In relative terms we are in a pretty powerless situation compared to other countries. Why is that? Mr Simmons: In comparison with all of the other European Union countries with the exception of Ireland, yes, we are in a very powerless state. I have made a point of visiting one or two of them recently to see what they have been doing and whether or not there is anything we can learn from them. Whilst they do record a bit of disease in wildlife they do not seem to have anywhere near the problem that we have and they appear not to be able to find a problem in badgers. Chris knows much more about the density of badgers in mainland Europe, but generally the density of badgers in Britain and Ireland is the highest anywhere in the world. Q45 Chairman: Why do you think that is? Mr Simmons: Grass and rain. Q46 Chairman: Nothing to do with protected species status? Mr Simmons: I think that may have something to do with it. I think it is grass, rain and ideal habitat which has been enhanced by farming. Dr Cheeseman: The pastoral system in Britain has created optimal conditions for badgers. Nowhere else in Europe do you get the mosaic of permanent pasture, deciduous woodland and some arable land which is perfect. We get densities in Britain in excess of 25 badgers to the square kilometre, but in the continent of Europe I do not know of any population that exceeds five to the square kilometre. We have huge populations here. Q47 Mr Mitchell: I am getting the impression that all this emphasis on vaccines, whether it is for badgers or cattle, is a mirage and an excuse for doing nothing essentially. We had an inquiry two years ago and the badger lovers came along and said "Do not kill the little darlings. Vaccination will be the answer." We asked how long it would be before we had a vaccination and they said it would be five years. You have just told us it will be eight to ten years. You have also told us that an approximate cost might be £1.5 billion and we spent £1.6 million on vaccine research last year. With those kinds of figures and that kind of timescale, let us face it, it ain't going to happen, meanwhile the crisis is just galloping on. Professor Young: I have sketched out the real long-term vision for making a vaccine that is going to be wonderful, but let us try to look to see whether there is anything in the shorter term that we could do that would be more practical and one issue would be BCG vaccine which we have got right now. Does that work in badgers? Maybe it does. Maybe that would work and that may crack our problem. There is a much shorter-term answer potentially there. You can have the Rolls Royce-type of vaccine which is wonderful, but when you come down to saying is there something more practical we could do in the short term then I think finding out that BCG works in badgers would be a good short-term thing to do. Q48 Diana Organ: You have talked about the length of time it will take to get a vaccine for the badger and it does seem to keep moving. In practical terms when will we have a workable vaccine for cattle? Professor Young: These are long-term predictions and I am talking about cattle vaccines here. If I am talking about badgers, I would want to know does BCG work in badgers, that is a good starting point. Cattle is a more demanding question, that is where it is more comparable to the human vaccine, it is a tough one. Q49 Chairman: Why do we not know if BCG works in badgers? Professor Young: Partly because it is a protected species and it is not easy in this country to do the experiments. The only data that we have got on BCG and badgers comes from the Republic of Ireland because they were able to do the experiment there. Q50 Diana Organ: The vaccination thing, as Austin said, seems to be a mirage. The bovine TB that is in cattle, can man catch it by eating the meat or drinking the milk of those cattle? Can we get TB? Professor Young: Yes, we can by drinking milk particularly with certain types of cattle whereby if you let them go to long-term diseased then they will produce bacteria in the milk and that is the reason we pasteurise milk and we have done that since the 1920s. We protect ourselves very actively against getting that disease. Q51 Diana Organ: We pasteurise our milk and our animals do not live that long. What are the real chances in the system of humans getting this TB? Mr Simmons: I think we need to look back in history and re-examine why we started dealing with bovine TB as a disease. Q52 Diana Organ: If the answer is that it is highly unlikely that the human population is at risk from getting TB because of the measures that we take with the pasteurisation of milk and we slaughter our beef animals when they are quite young, why do we bother about this at all? Why can we not have animals that might be sick but that we slaughter when they are young, we could take them out of the food chain if there is a lesion when they are in the abattoir and it does not matter so much about the milk if the animal is slightly sick because we pasteurise their milk? Why are we so concerned about this in the first place if there is a not a human health issue? Mr Simmons: In the Thirties when the Royal Commission looked at bovine TB in cattle as a zoonosis it estimated some 3,500 people a year dying from bovine TB in Great Britain and that was the basis for the control programme in the first place. Q53 Diana Organ: That was in the twenties before the pasteurisation of milk. Mr Simmons: That is correct, but I think it is worthwhile remembering that it is a combination of a number of factors that protect public health. Heat treatment, pasteurisation and UHT et cetera, is extremely effective in killing the organism, but as you have also pointed out, whilst we eat the meat of animals that may have been exposed or sometimes even been diseased, meat inspection largely covers that. The Food Standards Agency is looking at the risks associated with that and has a long-term experiment and risk assessment to try and establish the genuine risk overseen by some independent scientists. I think it is also important to remember that whilst we eat a lot of young animals, a lot of the cattle that we draw milk from are six or seven years old and a lot of the beef cows, the ones that produce the youngsters, are six or seven years old as well. Q54 Diana Organ: We do not eat their meat, we only drink their milk and we pasteurise their milk. Mr Simmons: I accept all of that. The point I was coming on to is that if we only have approximately 50 cases a year then one has to re-examine the need for doing it. We need to think about all of the aspects of the control programme to make sure that they are applied at the right point. Whilst pasteurisation and other forms of heat treatment may be effective, when we actually have relatively small numbers of affected cattle and only a very small proportion of those are badly affected, one has to ask the question whether heat treatment would always be effective if we had no controls in cattle and I am not convinced it would be. Q55 Chairman: What is the risk factor? You must have calculated what the risks are to an increase in the incidence of human TB on a do nothing strategy. Mr Simmons: We work very closely with the Department of Health on this issue and they have been looking very closely at the risk through occupational risk and also people that would be drinking raw milk and at the moment they appear not to be able to find any association between cattle and bovine TB. Even though we have obviously had an increase in cattle, we have not been able to establish any increase in the incidence in people. Q56 Chairman: Let me just be clear on what you have said there because that is quite significant. Are you saying that you could have no increase in the incidence of human TB on the basis of a do nothing different than we are at the moment strategy? Mr Simmons: I think one has to apply the controls at the most appropriate point and whilst I mentioned that there is a risk from the consumption of milk, heat treatment for the most part will completely eliminate that risk. I think if you have no controls on cattle, one could be less satisfied that those controls would be as effective because the rate of infection in milk may well go up. In addition to that, there is an increased occupational risk for farmers and other people who are handling cattle simply because if you have a larger number of infected cattle in the environment, in the national herd, the risk for the people who are working with them may well be increased as well. Q57 Diana Organ: How many farmers, stockmen, vets or people who work with cattle in the areas affected by the outbreak of TB have caught TB in the last three years? Do we have any records for how many people, as a result of their working with animals, have caught TB? Mr Simmons: There has been a recent report of a farm in Gloucestershire having contracted bovine TB from a beef herd where there was no milk for human consumption produced, so one could surmise reasonably, I think, that there has been occupational risk there, but that is really quite a rare occurrence. We believe that the risk mostly is through the consumption of raw milk, but one could not be confident that there are other routes which are not creating a risk. Professor Young: I was just going to say that I think it is something where the numbers are that about 50-odd people in the UK every year are coming down with M.bovis form of TB. Predominantly, those are people in the older age groups who contracted M.bovis infection prior to pasteurisation and are now suffering from the effects of that 50 or so years later, so it is a little bit of a difficult one. You can say, "Well, okay, we have had this big increase in M.bovis in cattle, but we have not seen the cases in humans", but maybe when we look 20 years down the line, we might see it coming up in humans. It is a slightly dangerous one to argue that there is no transmission to humans. Q58 Alan Simpson: I am just concerned that there is an important distinction between the long term and the end of time. Politicians tend to regard the long term as the next election and the end of time as the election after that. It seems to me that within neither timescale is a vaccination likely to be around, so I wonder if we can just shift the focus to the control of infection. There was a lot of excitement about gamma-interferon testing and I think it would be helpful if you could bring us up to speed on where that is now and whether the language of this has changed. Initially, talk was of this as being an alternative to culling and subsequently the language seems to have moved to "a supplement to". Mr Simmons: The interferon test is an alternative test to the existing family of skin tests and what it will not do is reduce the risk of infection, but it may well assist in the identification of infected animals more effectively in certain circumstances than the skin test, so whilst improved diagnostics, and we are looking at a number of different options, the skin test, the interferon test and one or two others, will help in clearing up infection and identifying infection in herds, they will clearly have little or no effect on the flow of infection into the cattle herds if it is coming from a wildlife reservoir. What we are doing is trying to evaluate in cost-benefit terms the value of the interferon test in known infected herds, so we have a pilot which has been running for some 18 months now which applies the test or applies the test to herds which are identified as having at least three reactors on the routine test. Provided one or more of those have got visible lesions and, therefore, you can confirm on clinical grounds, then we will apply one of three treatments to the herd, provided the farmer agrees to be a member of the trial in the first place. The three treatments are the existing status quo treatment, in other words, following on using the skin test as we would normally do in response to the incident, the second one is a more severe interpretation of the skin test, almost ignoring the reading from the comparative skin test, and the third one is the use of the interferon test eight to 20 days after the initial disclosing test. We have recruited a little over 100 herds into that which has been disappointing in the progress we have had and there are a number of reasons why we feel that that has been disappointing, but we have plans to extend the trial and we have plans to amend the proportion of treatments to try and make the pilot more attractive to farmers. In addition to that, we have three other ways in which we are using the interferon test outside of the areas or occasionally inside of those areas for certain other types of herds. Very occasionally we get very severe incidents where 30 or 40 per cent of the cows react to the skin test and in those circumstances it is a judgment which has to be made as to whether or not the herd is going to be slaughtered in its entirety probably because the infection is widespread within the herd. In order to assist the divisional veterinary manager in making a decision as to whether or not the whole herd should be slaughtered or not, the interferon test can be used quickly thereafter to identify those animals which have got early responses to the test which would not necessarily be detected either by the first or the second skin test. Q59 Alan Simpson: Can I just come back with a tighter question on that which is that because of the excitement which seemed to be expressed in the consultation paper about the gamma-interferon test, why has it not been more attractive? From the outside this looks to be something with an awful lot to commend it. If you can detect at an earlier stage, then you would expect that this would be seriously good news and not a difficult area to sell to the farming community. Why are you sitting here saying, "Well, we're disappointed"? Mr Simmons: I think one of the reasons why farmers have been somewhat reluctant to join up to the pilot is because of perceived, and possibly even a real, risk of losing more cattle than perhaps they would have done had we not used the test. What we are still uncertain of is the specificity of the test and if the specificity is as low as we think it is, you will find quite a high number of false positives. Now, that means that if you apply the test to, say, 60 or 70 cattle, you may find that seven or eight of those react to the test and the proportion of those in which you can find the organism when they are slaughtered and the tissues are cultured is relatively low. Now, that could be one of two things. It could be that the test is actually detecting animals which are not infected or diseased or it could be that the test is picking up disease or infection before any of the other methods we have, either visual inspection of the carcase and its parts or the culture mechanism, are able to detect the organism. What we need to do, and what we have a proposal to do, is try and do another piece of work to try and establish the value of the test in herds where there is no disease in order to get better information on the specificity of the test. We wish to work in conjunction with Northern Ireland in this who have a similar interest. Q60 Diana Organ: On the pilot, because the farmers are reluctant because they perceive that it shows many more false positives and they are going to lose more of their cattle, how many farmers had you hoped would come forward for the pilot which would be statistically good from a scientific point of view and how many farmers have actually come forward to be involved with the pilot? Since I think your answer is going to tell me that the numbers which have come forward are substantially less than you had hoped would come forward, have you not offered them any kind of financial incentive because they feel that they are going to lose more of their herd because of the way that the pilot is running with the false positives? Mr Simmons: The numbers which we have recruited have been low, lower than we would like. Q61 Diana Organ: How many? Mr Simmons: I believe we would want to have over three years 660 herds recruited. Q62 Diana Organ: And how many have you got at the moment? Mr Simmons: There are 106 as at the end of April after 18 months. We would do an interim analysis after 150 herds had been recruited. Depending on resource availability and SVS availability, we would wish to extend the area over which we applied the test or make it available to some other parts of the West Country and that is being considered at present. Q63 Paddy Tipping: You guys are fairly eminent scientists and you have been following the Irish experience which has had a lot of publicity recently. What is the status of that research, has it been published and has it been peer-reviewed? What do you make of it? Professor Young: This is the BCG and M.bovis Challenge in badgers. I have seen some of the primary data and it looks to me quite reasonable, but, as far as I know, it has not been peer-reviewed and it has not been published. It looks encouraging and it looks to be broadly in line with what we expected from other similar animal species. Q64 Paddy Tipping: You say it looks encouraging, Professor Young, but just explain the lessons to be drawn from the Irish experience. Professor Young: Lessons to be drawn? Q65 Paddy Tipping: Well, you have got this data and scientists do things for some reasons. Professor Young: Yes, it is always very precious to us to have some data, so, as I say, we might have imagined that BCG would have had some protective effect on badgers, but now we have the experimental data which allows us to move on to the next stage of the operation which is to say, "Okay, it protects against these badgers when we inject M.bovis into their trachea, but what does it do in a real-life situation when we vaccinate badgers with BCG and we let them run around in the wild and meet their badger friends? Does it protect against TB in that situation?" I think now that is a much more expensive experiment to do, but we are now very keen to try and do that, so having got the one piece of evidence, that gives us the incentive to go on and do the larger study. Q66 Paddy Tipping: Maybe I read the wrong kind of literature, but in the things I have read about this, people are saying, "Well, what the Irish experience seems to suggest is that we ought to cull badgers". Is that really what it says? Professor Young: I think we are talking about two different trials here. I was specifically talking about the Challenge studies where they have looked at the effects of BCG. The other studies where they have culled badgers in Ireland, somebody else may want to pick up on. Q67 Paddy Tipping: Well, let's go back to the first question. Has it been published, has it been peer-reviewed and what is the status of it? Mr Simmons: Well, as I understand it, the Irish Government has funded and completed this four-area badger culling trial. The work is complete, the analysis is complete and they have submitted two papers to publication. Beyond that, I have no further information or at least no information which I think is reliable. Q68 Paddy Tipping: Have you talked to your Irish colleagues? Mr Simmons: I do talk to my Irish colleagues regularly. Q69 Paddy Tipping: What are they telling you? Mr Simmons: They say, "Be patient". Q70 Paddy Tipping: So to go back to the papers I read which say that culling is the answer, your advice to me is to be patient? Mr Simmons: I think if I was going to use any of the data from Ireland and the papers from Ireland to provide some sort of advice to the Minister, I would want to look at it very, very carefully and make sure that we were absolutely clear that what we thought it said was what it really said. Q71 Chairman: That sounds like a very good, cautious scientific approach, but in paragraph 4.82 on page 33 of the consultation document it says, "Modelling studies suggest that as culling is more effective in eradicating disease from badger populations than a vaccination, a combined strategy would be likely to be more efficacious than vaccination alone", which does seem to suggest that you do see a role for culling, taking into account the reservations you have had as far as vaccines are concerned. Is that a scientifically provable assertion or not? Mr Simmons: I think what we would act on is the evidence and if the evidence suggested that a combination of vaccination and culling was the most effective way, then that would be one of the things which we would be very careful to include in the discussions. Q72 Chairman: But the problem which you have, as we identified at the beginning of our line of questioning, is that Krebs has not been completed, part of Krebs has gone west because you have stopped it, and you are now having to advise Ministers on a new strategy which relies, in the sentence I have just quoted, on modelling studies. Modelling, I presume, is informed by some degree of real-world information, but just tell us, what is the real-world information which informs the model which enables a statement to say that modelling studies suggest that culling is more effective in eradicating disease from badgers than vaccination? There is a comma after that, so I do not want to be accused of selectively quoting, but that does suggest that you put quite a lot of store by the effect of culling. Mr Simmons: I think we have had a series of analyses done by various different scientists which show that if you remove all of the badgers from a particular area, then the effect of that on the incidence of cattle is quite dramatic, and I do not think there is any suggestion that we would consider anything else. Having said that, in respect of the possibility of doing something which is less of a Draconian intervention, then we would want to consider the possibility of something which combined the removal of infected badgers and vaccinating those which remained. Chris has referred to the use of models and inevitably there will need to be some assumptions, particularly about badger prevalence and badger transmission rates from badgers to cattle, for example, and we would hope that the data which comes from the randomised badger culling trial will be useful in trying to inform and refine those models to help us work our way forward through this. Chairman: Well, I am sure we will want to take up some of the questions about Krebs and randomised trials when the Minister comes. Q73 Mr Mitchell: Where is this proof that complete culling diminishes the incidence of TB in cattle? Where does that proof come from? Mr Simmons: The Krebs Report in 1997 concluded that, and I do not know whether I have the exact quote with me, the complete removal of badgers, and, therefore, the effect of disease on cattle, was compelling evidence that badgers contribute to the disease in cattle. Q74 Mr Mitchell: What you said about the Irish thing I was not clear about because the Irish examine, when they cull, whether the badgers have TB. Was it your statement that nothing has been published yet relevant to that study or does it include the further argument that where areas were cleared, there was a reduction in the incidence of TB in cattle? Is either of those sets of figures published? Mr Simmons: The Irish have done work in a smaller area known as East Offaly, and I am not that familiar with the methodology there, but, as I understand it, the badgers were removed from a central core and around it there was an area where there was no badger removal and these were compared and I think there was some doubt about the scientific validity of the conclusions they reached, which is why they went on to the four-area badger culling trial which, if you like, was the more robust approach to seeking a solution. Q75 Mr Mitchell: So we do not have any figures from the four areas? Mr Simmons: Only the published work which sets out the methodology and the numbers of badgers they have removed from the areas they were working in, but not the results or the analysis and the conclusions. Mr Mitchell: It seems to me that we are pussyfooting around really. You say there is evidence in the cleared areas that the incidence of TB in cattle is reduced. There is a fairly clear a priori connection between TB in badgers and TB in cattle. The disease is spreading and all the attempts either to give us conclusive proof or deal with it, whether it is to deal with it through vaccination or the Krebs triplet study, are foundering or are years away, and here we are pussyfooting around because Ministers and presumably officials do not want to kill little darling badgers. Chairman: Well, Austin, I am going to suggest that you hold that question there because that is really, I think, for the Minister. Mr Simmons is going to stay on, so his sage advice can go to the Minister, and the Minister has got a flavour of it. It is not often that Ministers come, as to the cinema, for the forthcoming attractions, but he is here. Gentlemen, can I thank you very much indeed for your patience in answering our questions. I think you have given us, and indeed the members of the public who have come this afternoon, a great deal of food for thought and perhaps some glimmer of hope, but a lot of challenge ahead. Thank you very much.
Witnesses: Mr Ben Bradshaw, a Member of the House, Minister of State for Nature Conservation and Fisheries, and Mr Alick Simmons, Head of the Veterinary Endemic and Zoonoses Division, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; and Professor John Bourne, Chair, Independent Science Group on Bovine TB, examined. Q76 Chairman: Minister, welcome to the Committee. Mr Bradshaw: As you commented, Chairman, it is not very usual for Ministers to come and listen to their warm-up act, if you like, and, having done so, I found it a very useful experience, but, with no disrespect to the witnesses you have just heard from, I felt that there were one or two gaps in some of the answers which I would be quite happy to fill, if that would be helpful. Q77 Chairman: Well, I am all for a good filling act! Mr Bradshaw: It will take me two or three minutes to go through some of the gaps. Firstly, Mr Drew asked for some positive news. Alick touched on this in his answer, but I think rather too reticently. We need to be very, very cautious obviously about the results from the last two years, but I think there is a widespread perception out there that TB is increasing by 20 per cent a year; it is not. There has been a drop in the last two years, a small drop in every region, including in the south-west. Q78 Chairman: That is not what it says here in paragraph 4.11 on page 23 of your own consultation document. Mr Bradshaw: Well, these figures only came out last week, so they are more up to date. I can read them out to you now, if you like, or I can leave them with the Committee. Q79 Chairman: I think we can certainly have them in writing because that would be helpful. Mr Bradshaw: I would be happy to do that. On some of the points which were made about field studies, we are hoping or we are looking at moving forward to field trials of both badger and cattle vaccines, and I can talk about that in a bit more detail, if you like, in questions. We are hopeful of getting very soon a much more reliable live test for badgers, which would be a very useful potential tool were we ever to embark on a badger control strategy. The TB-99 and the RTA results are expected this summer, at least the preliminary results, which will give us, we hope, a lot of useful information and help to determine policy. Mr Breed asked whether our sticking to the Krebs trials meant that there would be no change in policy before the end of Krebs and I assume he meant a change of policy when it came to badger control. We have never ruled out a change of policy on badger control and indeed Professor John Bourne has said that if there are significant results from the proactive trials, and he reviews them every six months, he will let me have those. Indeed we have changed our policy, if you like, on the reactive trial by abandoning it and we have also said quite clearly that we will learn from whatever there is to learn when and if the Irish trials are published. As was said, there is a great deal we do know about bio-security and not nearly enough is being done. I spoke to a Cornish farmer on a visit a couple of weeks ago to farms in Devon and Cornwall who bred pedigree beef cattle and who had successfully excluded badgers from his land with the use of a simple electric fence around his property. We know, as was suggested earlier in the evidence from the witnesses, that there is a lot more that farmers could do to help themselves in bio-security. Diana Organ asked why we bothered about TB and really the blunt answer to that is that if we just let rip, you do increase the risk to human health. That is the advice that I am given. You also destroy your export market and one of the interesting things about vaccination in New Zealand, for example, I believe I am right in saying, is that the New Zealanders have already said that even if a vaccine were found, they would not use it because they do not want to destroy their export market. Q80 Chairman: Let me just ask you about that because there is a slight flaw in your logic. You start opening up with the good news and telling us that you are going to do various trials on a vaccine and then you say that there is a danger if you use a vaccine, and I do not quite understand the consistency between the two statements. Mr Bradshaw: I am simply pointing out that in New Zealand, which is rather different because agriculture and exports play a rather bigger role in their national economy, I believe I am right in saying, though I may be wrong here and Alick may want to correct me, they have ruled out the use of vaccine as a policy because of the impact that would have on their export market. Q81 Chairman: Well, let's ask you the straightforward question. I know you have got a consultation exercise going on, but if you want to maintain an export trade, then, from what you have just said, vaccines are out, so what do you want to do? Mr Simmons: That is cattle vaccine. Q82 Chairman: Not a badger vaccine? Mr Bradshaw: No, no, that is cattle. We do not export badgers! Q83 Chairman: Well, there are some people who would probably wish you could! Mr Bradshaw: Anyway, I hope that was helpful in terms of clarifying and answering slightly more directly some of the questions which were raised in the earlier session. There was a final one from Mr Tipping who asked about the different trials in Ireland and I think there was a bit of a misunderstanding. There were two trials, one being the field trial on a badger vaccine, the results of which I am not aware of having been published, but I am aware that they have been quite positive and we have been collaborating with the Irish on that and we are looking ourselves at the possibility of a controlled badger vaccine field trial in this country, and the other trial was the badger culling trial which has not been published and has not been peer-reviewed. Q84 Paddy Tipping: And I think you said, Minister, earlier on that if those results are published, there was a note of scepticism, I thought, about the Irish trials. Mr Bradshaw: From me? Q85 Paddy Tipping: Yes. Mr Bradshaw: The culling trials? Q86 Paddy Tipping: Yes. Mr Bradshaw: No, no, no. Well, I have made absolutely clear that if there is anything useful which we can learn from the trials once they have been published and peer-reviewed based on the advice that I am given by my experts and by scientists, they will help inform our policy. The trials are different there and Professor Bourne may want to say something about this himself as he knows much more about it than I do. They are over a much wider geographical area, they are culling a higher proportion of the badger population because they are using snares rather than traps and snares are more effective, and there are no, I think I am right in saying, what we would term 'control areas' because even in the areas where they are not culling, they are doing a bit of reactive culling actually. Q87 Paddy Tipping: So have you talked to your Irish counterpart about these? Mr Bradshaw: Yes, I have. Q88 Paddy Tipping: What is he telling you? Mr Bradshaw: To be patient. Q89 Mr Drew: There is just a point on this in that I think we must not get the incorrect impression that the Irish trials, like the Thornbury experiment before, have no real scientific rationale behind them. You may be able to draw some conclusions, but there are real dangers when people say, "Take half the badgers out which proves that if the cattle do not seem to be going down with TB that they were the cause". For example, there are two issues, firstly, that you would have to compare with next door to see if the TB stayed the same or actually reduced for whatever reason and, more particularly, what happens when badgers re-enter an area? There are all sorts of things, so there are some dangers in drawing conclusions to something which is not scientifically provable, unlike the trials which we are undertaking. Mr Bradshaw: I accept that and it is nice to hear someone speak up for the scientific rigorousness of Professor Bourne's trials. Q90 Diana Organ: We do have a problem with the gamma-interferon pilot, the numbers which are coming forward of farmers because they are feeling very sensitive about it causing so many false positives. We heard the numbers of how many were now involved in that pilot and I had made the suggestion that since they are not coming forward, why are we not offering a financial incentive to those farmers who might come forward to be part of the pilot so that we can get a statistically robust number for us to see how the gamma-interferon t trials are going? Mr Bradshaw: I do not know whether it is financial incentive which is the problem. My understanding is the one which was expressed earlier, that the basic concern of farmers, although I think there is a sense in which this is changing, has been that because the gamma-interferon test is much more sensitive, they will have cattle culled out which are not infected. We are increasing the use of gamma-interferon both in the pilot areas, as Alick said earlier, from 30 per cent to 50 per cent of those who join the scheme, but we are also using it in some of the very severe breakdowns which he also mentioned and offering it to farmers in those cases because the counterargument to the argument that you are going to kill cattle unnecessarily is that actually you may be more certain of clearing out the disease using the gamma-interferon test. That is the balance you always have to strike when you have a test which is sensitive, but not specific compared with one which is specific and not sensitive. Clearly the costs to the taxpayer then are much greater in terms of compensation, but the likelihood that you have cleared out the disease is much higher and there are farmers who suffer very, very serious breakdowns who are, as the Reading study showed, a very small minority of breakdown sufferers who are opting for that as a solution because they think it is the best way of clearing out the disease. Q91 Alan Simpson: You might actually want to pass this over either to Alick Simmons or Professor Bourne, but in terms of scientific rigour, can I just try and test a couple of things. Dr Cheeseman gave a very important cautionary warning to us which said that even if you were completely to eradicate badgers, you then have to account for the incidence of TB in other species, so in what ways are we factoring in a scientific weighting of this creation of a gap rather than the elimination of the disease, whether we are just talking about an identifiable reduction, which is a cause in time rather than the long-term answer, and would that gap be filled by other infected species? The second is more specifically to Professor Bourne. Sometimes politicians have difficulties in understanding scientific jargon, but, Professor Bourne, I think you were remarkably clear when you said that the claims that wholesale badger culling were the answer to TB were "absolute tosh". I think we can understand those kind of words. Professor Bourne: So can farmers, so that is why they were used! Q92 Alan Simpson: It would be helpful, I think, if you could elaborate for the Committee on your concerns about us being taken down that path as a presumed solution. Professor Bourne: Well, it is difficult to know where to start, but let me start with how we conceived a problem, that is, the ISG, from the outset. We recognised that any future disease control, not eradication, but control programme of bovine TB would be multi-dimensional. We have enlarged upon that in our subsequent reports, recognising that it may include a component of badger removal and badger culling which is selective given the sustainability that we have to consider, but it would also include a cattle component which recognised the fact that this is an infectious disease of cattle and will be transmitted by infected cattle one to another. Now, it was on that basis that we advised then MAFF, now Defra, to put in place a broad range of policy options which would encompass Plan A, which is the impact of badger culling, which many saw as the only single answer to this problem and we certainly do not believe that, we never did then and we certainly do not now, but also would encompass what you have identified as Plan B which would be a focus on policy options and also going on, if you wished, to Plan C which might include things like vaccination. Now, within the time-frame of our work, with respect to Plan A, and I have heard rubbishing remarks about the randomised badger culling trial this afternoon which I think are totally unwarranted, we have shown very clearly on the basis of a scientifically designed, well-implemented trial, that localised culling is ineffective in influencing the disease in cattle, so that is really out of the equation. Proactive culling, which, like reactive, is done in a way which respects welfare aspects of wildlife in this country, sustainability, which was imposed upon the trial by previous ministerial decisions, that culling badgers proactively in that way may or may not have an impact on the disease in cattle, we still do not have precise information yet to inform government on that, and we would expect to have this information by 2006. Let's focus on what you think and I think is Plan B, which really relates to a short-term policy option for the control of TB in cattle, which in fact may be the only long-term option if we find that badger-culling in the way carried out in the trial is ineffective, and I think I can be far more optimistic than previous speakers about what has been achieved over the last few years in moving forward to implementing effective short-term options. I addressed this issue when we last spoke in December when I indicated that if one goes back five years, it was recognised that the tuberculin test was actually first class, gold standard, sacrosanct, that as a result of that, cattle were only diseased in the late stages of infection, but we never saw that because they never arrived on the scene because the tuberculin test eliminated them, but cattle transmission was not a feature, so "Let's focus on badgers". Now, that is what I call absolute tosh. If you feel that if you focus on badgers solely, you are going to control this disease in cattle, that simply is not true. I would argue that the disease has got to the stage in this country where if you eliminated practically badgers overnight, and other wildlife for that matter which carry TB, you would still have a serious cattle problem to contend with. Now, we have argued repeatedly from the outset that you cannot effectively control an infectious disease without a reliable diagnostic test and I have no doubt that whilst the tuberculin test under some circumstances can be extremely effective in the way it is applied, which is primarily as a herd test, the way it is being used in this country over the last couple of decades and now as an individual animal test will not by itself lead to control of disease. It has to be, we believe, complemented by an improved test which leads us into gamma-interferon, but let me indicate the areas of optimism which I indicated to you. On the basis of pathogenesis studies in cattle, we have recognised from experimental animals that cattle can transmit the disease in the very early stages of infection and one does not have to wait for the well-lesioned, clinically sick animal for transmission to occur and it can occur early. It can occur before one is able to identify it by the tuberculin test and in the experimental situations we have worked with, all animals have been identified by gamma-interferon, but even animals where the disease is well developed, animals with well-developed lesions, had been missed by the tuberculin test. Now, that is indicative, though one needs more evidence than that, but it does, nonetheless, point to the fact that we have a cattle transmission route which can lead to problems in the field. By the application of molecular epidemiological techniques and now animal movement data, it has been shown quite clearly that the movement of infected cattle around the country can lead to infected animals appearing, say, from Cornwall into Cumbria and resulting in herd breakdowns in Cumbria. It is no real surprise that post-foot and mouth, 60 per cent of the breakdowns have been associated with animal movements, and I recommend you read our report in 2001 which addressed all of these issues. Q93 Chairman: If it is so clear as to what was happening in 2001, why are we debating a new government strategy on controlling this question? Professor Bourne: It is not a question for me. We have also put in place a risk analysis questionnaire ---- Q94 Chairman: Did you have any input to the document which represents the strategy which the Government are currently consulting on? Professor Bourne: If you look back through the records, we commented on future policy options in the report in 2001 where we identified in a MAFF consultation document much of what is now in the short-term proposals, and you will also see in the records, which I wrote personally, a short-term policy option paper which was presented to Defra over twelve months ago, much of which has now been embodied in the consultation paper. Q95 Chairman: So, in fairness, it is a question to you. Professor Bourne: So we are frustrated. We believe that the research which has been put in place over the last five years is now delivering and whilst there is a long way to go in getting and assessing this research data, the messages are fairly clear, that out there there is a cattle problem which has to be dealt with by focusing on the cattle problem which is, to all intents and purposes, the purpose of short-term control measures unrelated to badger control because we as yet do not know what to do about badgers. Now, reference has been made to the gamma-interferon trial and I think it is showing some very useful pointers, and Alick referred earlier to 100 herds being enrolled into the trial and I have seen data from the first 28 of those which was presented to TB Forum. Those herds, which had been subjected to the tuberculin test and had test-positive animals removed, were then subjected to a gamma-interferon test eight to 28 days later and 400 animals were shown to be positive in that test, of which 60 had active TB lesions. Now, these animals were capable of transmitting disease and yet they passed the tuberculin test. They may well have been picked up by subsequent tuberculin tests, but undoubtedly some would not have been and I think this emphasises the problem. We have the diagnostic test which is used in cattle which is ineffective in clearing a herd of the disease, these animals are then moved around the countryside, be they tested or be they not, which leads to the infection developing elsewhere, but until that is tackled by improved diagnosis, stringent restrictions on animal movement and a sensible application of infectious disease precautions by the farming industry, we really will not get anywhere in controlling this disease. Q96 Chairman: Well, that was very clear, so let's ask the Minister. In March 1999 your predecessor, Jeff Rooker, said that there were three strands to the Government's strategy: first, work to develop improved control strategies, to which Professor Bourne has just referred; second, work to improve our understanding of herd breakdown, to which Professor Bourne has just referred; and, third, the need to examine the role of badgers in TB more closely, to which Professor Bourne has just referred. Yet here we are in 2004 with a clear steer and a clear statement by Professor Bourne where he says, "Better testing, Rolls-Royce microbiological safety, deal with cattle movements, there you are, that's the way forward", and yet I turn to page 5 of your document and it says, "Reaching agreement on a new TB strategy will inevitably take some time". Why are we proceeding on this consultation exercise when the Minister next to you has given a pretty clear steer as to what can be done now without the need to consult and achieve some positive improvements in the situation? Mr Bradshaw: Well, we, as a government department, are obliged to consult, but we have taken action since those initial ---- Q97 Chairman: But you have not done. Mr Bradshaw: Yes, we have. We have introduced movement restrictions, we have introduced more frequent testing, we have told farmers, and they are well aware of, what they can do in terms of bio-security and you discussed this in the earlier evidence session. We distribute information to farmers and from Defra it goes through the National Farmers' Union, and it is on our websites. If you talk to farmers, they know what can be done. There is the political problem out there, I think, among farmers, some of whom feel reluctant to take measures which I think in their heart of hearts they know are absolutely sensible in the face of what they see as the reluctance by the Government to deal with what they would consider as a wildlife problem. Q98 Chairman: But, Minister, when foot and mouth was around, you had no hesitation as a government in laying down an absolute regime to control movements of animals and bio-security measures. You were in there, you were trying every single known practical way to stop that disease and yet here we have a disease and in your own document, it is very interesting what you find when you bury yourself into Annex A on page 55. It says, "In the next eight years no action being taken. The cost to the taxpayer may amount to over £1 billion". I just heard Professor Bourne give about as clear an explanation as to what ought to be done now which actually plays to the Rooker agenda put forward in March 1999 and you are saying to us, "But we have a duty to consult". Mr Bradshaw: I will have to have a look at what Jeff Rooker said, but you are implying that nothing has been done since Jeff Rooker gave evidence to this Committee and that has not been the case. Q99 Chairman: No, I am implying that Mr Rooker laid down three strands of a strategy which line up in terms of work which Professor Bourne has just put before the Committee which, in his judgment, offer some immediate respite from the onward march of TB. We have heard earlier on that there are considerable scientific difficulties in dealing with questions of the vaccine, so we can rule that out possibly for up to eight years. We have heard that there are still questions to be asked about the culling of badgers, so as an immediate solution to the problem we can rule that out, but what are we left with? We are left with bio-security, better testing and restrictions, if you like, on the way that cattle are moved about. If those are the three knowns, why are you not piling in the resources and the weight of the law, if necessary, to deal with this disease with at least the tools which you know work, as Professor Bourne has just said? Mr Bradshaw: Well, the implication of your question is that nothing has been done on those three things since Jeff Rooker gave his evidence, but that is not the case. Q100 Chairman: No, I am just saying that Professor Bourne indicated that a body of work following the Rooker plan has indicated that within the body of knowledge today there appear to be three things which can be done supposedly with some success. All I am saying is, why are you not doing them? Mr Bradshaw: We have done them. We have introduced cattle movement restrictions, we have changed the frequency of testing ---- Q101 Chairman: But you are now busy consulting on another strategy. Mr Bradshaw: We are consulting on more stringent cattle movement restrictions, on more regular testing, on post and pre-movement testing and some of the recommendations which have been made more recently, but to suggest that we have not implemented any of the recommendations which were made back then is simply not the case. We have and we are now considering what more measures could be implemented. Q102 Chairman: This is a document which contains no indication by way of target, number or anything about the relative effectiveness of what you are consulting about, so if somebody is going to give you a, "Shall we have this or that?" answer to the question, how are they going to know what is going to deliver an effective solution to the problem when your document gives them no information about the potential success rates of the different things you are consulting about and all it does is give slightly out-of-date information about the onward march of TB? Mr Bradshaw: Well, I would guess, and John may, as a scientist, have a better view on this, that the only way you can make such a prediction is based on scientific evidence or experience and that is exactly what ---- Q103 Chairman: But Professor Bourne has been very clear. I do not think I have heard him speak with greater clarity on what can be done now to deal with the situation. Mr Bradshaw: And that is exactly why most of the recommendations that we are going out to consultation on now are exactly those which Professor John Bourne has just recommended. Q104 Chairman: I am sorry, but I find it very difficult in a practical, real-world situation when, as we speak, more and more herds are going down with TB. Mr Bradshaw: Actually you are wrong. Q105 Chairman: Well, I may be a few per cent wrong and the rate of increase may be slowing down, but in absolute numbers ---- Mr Bradshaw: No, the actual numbers are falling. It may be perhaps that some of the measures that we have taken post-Rooker on cattle movement and on testing have actually had an effect. Q106 Chairman: But if you said numbers are coming down ---- Mr Bradshaw: It may be and that is why we should build on those measures which we are intending to do. Q107 Chairman: Why then does Figure 3 on page 23 of this document, which is your publication which is not exactly miles out of date, show an inexorable march up to the financial year 2012 and 2013 where we are looking at expenditure of about £325 million a year? Mr Bradshaw: Because the decrease has only been recorded in the last two years. I will give you the figures ---- Q108 Chairman: Well, hang on. If it has only been recorded in the last two years ---- Mr Bradshaw: Well, you asked for the figures, Mr Chairman, and I just said I would give them to you. The number of new TB incidents were down 14.2 per cent on the period January to April 2003, 1,264 against 1,473. At 48 per cent, the percentage of confirmed new incidents is below that of January to April 2003 when it was 52 per cent and 2002 when it was 64 per cent. The number of reactors slaughtered so far in 2004 were down 20 per cent on the same period in 2003, 6,596 against 8,229, and the average total number of reactors per incident, a proxy for the severity of TB breakdowns, were two reactors per incident compared with 2.2. Now, I can give you a lot more detailed figures and I will leave the Committee with them, but I think it is important that we take note of the recent trends in the disease, not that we should think that this is some dawn, but that it is important to take note that some of the measures we actually have been taking, which you implied we had not since Jeff Rooker's evidence, may be having some impact. Q109 Chairman: Well, I did not imply that nothing had been done. I think, with respect, you are misinterpreting the direction of my questioning because your own document, from which I worked, gives a different situation in terms of the statistics on this. You have now brought to the attention of the Committee some revised figures, for which we are grateful, so what does that mean in financial terms then in terms of cost? Would you like to revise down your own projection of the costs in the light of what you have just told us? Mr Bradshaw: No, but at the same time I think it would be wrong to base a projection on increased costs, as you did a little bit earlier on, ---- Q110 Chairman: I am only questioning what you have said in your document. I do not make these numbers up. Mr Bradshaw: ---- assuming that there will continue to be a 20 per cent annual increase. There are other impacts on costs, such as the cost of compensation, and if we are going to go ahead with field studies and vaccines, that is going to cost more money. Q111 Chairman: What are you revising down, your projection in the way that this disease is going to move forward in the light of this data, and you now use that in that respect? Mr Bradshaw: Not yet, no, because I only had these figures this morning, but we have budgeted, I think I am right in saying, in Defra's budget in this financial year for about £90 million on TB compared with £74 million in the last financial year, so our budgetary projections are still going up, but they have not taken into account these latest figures. Professor Bourne: If I can comment here, as I see it and as the Group see it, there are real difficulties in translating research findings into policy. These are emerging research findings and we have commented that we believe they are sound enough on which to base future policy options, and no doubt they would have to be modified as new scientific findings emerge. However, I think one has to accept that Defra can only control TB with the full and active co-operation of the agricultural industry, the livestock industry. It is impossible, I think, for them to do it on their own. I think a real problem, and I know to my cost with blood, sweat and tears, is persuading farmers of the validity of these scientific data coming through; it is extremely difficult. There is another problem which I think needs to be addressed and that is the validity of the gamma-interferon test. We need an improved diagnostic test and gamma-interferon is the only one on the horizon. We have pushed hard to get this test developed and are still pushing to ensure that it is improved, but we believe that one has to use it in the field in a way which provides you with appropriate data on sensitivity and specificity so as to determine how it can be used in a range of policy options. You are aware of the difficulties we have had with Defra in relation to the gamma-interferon test, but I have no doubt at all that we and Defra need to do work to better establish the gamma-interferon test as a policy tool and that will be another step forward in persuading the agricultural industry about the appropriateness of these measures. Q112 Paddy Tipping: So can we get the headline message right? I think it is the same headline message as that which our previous witnesses gave to us, that in the short term it is bio-security and cattle movement measures which are going to make the difference. It is as simple as that, is it not? Professor Bourne: Bio-security in its widest sense, absolutely, yes. Mr Bradshaw: We know, and there is firm evidence there, about cattle-to-cattle transmission. We know it from the things which Professor Bourne was saying earlier about the restocking after foot and mouth and if you look at the different strains of bovine TB on a national map, if you split the strains up into different strains, you can see how they have shot from one end of the country to the other. That is not being spread by badgers. Now, badgers may have a role at a local level when the disease is established and there is that wildlife reservoir, and we know what measures can be taken not only to prevent cattle-to-cattle transmission, but to protect cattle from badger-to-cattle transmission, very simple measures like the ones I have mentioned earlier, so it does seem to make sense in the short term to get on and do better on those, in the medium and long term badger vaccines, cattle vaccines, live badger tests and possibly evidence either from Professor Bourne's trials or from the Irish trials on the efficacy or otherwise of a badger culling strategy. Q113 Paddy Tipping: Why can we not get this message across? Why, when I read the farming press or even the national press, do I hear such strong messages coming from farmers and landowners saying that culling has got to be the answer? Clearly it is not the answer. The real answer in the short term is better bio-security measures. What can be done to get that across? Mr Bradshaw: I think there were two bits to that question. You are better to ask the representatives of the NFU that, but from the conversations I have had with farmers it is because they have seen a large increase in the badger population, they have seen this coincide with the increase in TB and they are aware of not proper scientific trials in the past but experiments, like the Thornbury experiment, where badgers were completely exterminated and that seemed to have an impact on TB, although there was no proper control. I cannot answer for farmers. Some farmers do take bio-security very seriously. I mention a pedigree beef farmer I met in Cornwall a couple of weeks ago who is surrounded by TB breakdowns but has never had one on his farm and does not have any badgers because he has a simple electric fence that keeps the badgers out very, very effectively. Chris Cheeseman mentioned his experience of badgers going into farm buildings and eating feed. I do not know whether any of you have seen his video but he has got a video that I am sure he would be prepared to show you of badgers running all over farms in and out of buildings. Some of the farms I have visited that have had TB breakdowns have absolutely no bio-security whatsoever. They have gaps this big between the walls of the cattle feeding areas and the floors, they have modern dairies that are completely open to the elements. Nothing is being done on a lot of these farms as far as bio-security that I can see. We cannot force farmers to do this but in the context of the new Animal Health and Welfare Strategy and the possibility of an animal disease levy we can at least introduce incentives and rewards for farmers who are good on bio-security. That gives us a tool. Q114 Paddy Tipping: That was just the point I wanted to get to because you are consulting on financial incentives around the new way of paying CAP payments and around cross-compliance. Could we build this into cross-compliance? Mr Bradshaw: Yes, indeed. Animal health and welfare is going to be an element of cross-compliance, not in the first phase but in the second, and that will be part of the consultation. There is also the question of how we pay compensation. There is a review of the rationalisation of compensation going on at the moment in the wake of the National Audit Commission report which shows that we were overpaying quite substantially in Wales on TB compensation. There is the possibility of introducing some mechanism into the compensation payment to take into account measures that farmers take on bio-security. All of these things are being considered as part of our renewed TB Strategy. Q115 Paddy Tipping: Are we going to do it? Mr Bradshaw: I do not want to pre-empt the consultation. I think it makes sense to let us see the consultation through to 4 June and then we will make announcements in due course. Q116 Paddy Tipping: Are you serious about this? Mr Bradshaw: Having read what I have and listened to people like John Bourne, as I have, and spoken to farmers in the context of the Government's Animal Health and Welfare Strategy, I am keen, not just because of TB but for a whole range of animal diseases, that we must have a mechanism in the way that we pay farmers, and thank goodness we are moving away from subsidies to production and that gives us several new opportunities to do this, we must build into the system of agricultural finance in this country incentives for good husbandry. Q117 Paddy Tipping: Can I ask you one separate set of questions. You just said you talk to Professor Bourne a lot and I think you said in your opening statement that Professor Bourne brings you up-to-date with the Krebs trials every six months. This is a scientific trial that is being run in a sense separately from you, in a sense he is blind from you, Minister, but you did intervene a little while ago around reactive culling. If things were going wrong, if there were developments within the Krebs trials, would you know about it? Would you be in a position to intervene? In a sense, what is the relationship between the policy and the science? Mr Bradshaw: It is very good, we go for a beer together. Seriously, right from the start since I have been in this job, Professor Bourne has made absolutely clear that if there are significant interim results, which are reviewed every six months, he will be able to say exactly what he sees. I do not see these results but he gives me his assurance, and this is exactly what happened with the reactive trial, that if there are significant results earlier than 2006 he will tell me so that I can act on them. This was one of the recommendations that you might have wanted to come on to from the Godfray report which was that I should demand to see these results. I have not made my mind up on that, but I trust Professor Bourne, his advice is sound and dispassionate and he does not have an agenda. When he tells me that if there are any significant results from these trials before 2006 he will tell me, I take him at his word. Q118 Paddy Tipping: Professor Bourne wanted to comment. Professor Bourne: I think what you are saying is we are independent, and we value that independence. The Minister said we were dispassionate but we are not, we are very passionate about controlling this damn disease and getting some answers. The situation is as he described. Members of the group analyse the data on a six month basis and as a result of the October analysis we believed there was information that needed to be presented to the Minister and the Minister stopped the trial, against our advice. I am bound to say we did advise the Minister that although we would like to continue it for another two weeks until the end of the coming period, we were likely to return in May with no different answer. In fact, the March interim analysis has now been completed and the Minister has been informed that there is an even more marked shift in the data from reactive, so had it not been stopped in November it most certainly would have been stopped now, so in that respect I think the decision was correct and I think the action of the ISG was correct. The situation with regard to proactive is the data is as yet uninformative; when it is informative the Minister will be informed. Q119 Paddy Tipping: Just going back to the Godfray recommendations, you are still consulting about those but you are not inclined to go forward with the recommendation that the Minister should see the results? Mr Bradshaw: I will be perfectly blunt, I think people have got too excited by the Godfray recommendations. Godfray says we should base our policy on an assumption that there is a wildlife reservoir in badgers but I have based my assumption on that ever since I was appointed and that was the whole point of the Krebs trials. Krebs said that there was an assumption. What we do not have is any scientific evidence of a particular culling strategy being helpful, that is the issue here. Godfray does not move us one inch further forward on that. Chairman: That is right. I am just reading the same thing that you have read. Mr Mitchell? 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 one 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 impossible 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 we 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 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 naïve 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. 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 not 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. |