I’m fed up with talking about the weather, but I can console myself with the fact we have grabbed every opportunity so far and progress is not too bad.Badger vaccination plan ‘guaranteed to backfire’
VACCINATING badgers against TB was not only impractical, but could promote the spread of the disease, according to independent TB adviser, Ueli Zellweger, speaking at Beef Expo last week.
The Swiss-trained vet, now based in South West England, said Defra's plan to inject badgers was ‘guaranteed to backfire', as there were only two ‘golden rules' regarding vaccination – and this would break both of them.
The first rule was to ‘never, never vaccinate a stressed or weakened animal', but trapping and manually injecting badgers would do just that, he said.
Stress compromised the immune system and the effectiveness of the vaccine, but more seriously, a weak badger would fall down the social pecking order and be forced out of the sett, increasing perturbation.
A displaced badger trying to join a sett would lead to fighting, with a high risk of TB transmission. A weakened badger with no sett would be more likely to forage in a farmyard, depositing infected excretions (saliva, urine and faeces), putting cattle at risk.
The second rule was to never vaccinate against a disease when you have ‘even the slightest suspicion' the animal already had it.
Mr Zellweger said apparently healthy animals could be carrying TB, but their bodies had ‘walled it off', keeping it contained. Vaccinating those animals could boost infection and lead to badgers shedding a lot of bacteria.
Testing a badger before vaccination was not a solution, he said, as that would involve keeping it caged for several days, further stressing and weakening it. A stressed animal would give a less accurate reading to a test not particularly reliable in the first place.
Mr Zellweger also cast the vaccine in doubt, saying the human BCG vaccine was known to be of reduced efficacy and ‘poor at protecting most animal species'.
Who would prescribe the vaccine, he asked, saying it would be a POM-V, like most animal vaccines. He doubted vets would get involved and said Defra was mistaken if it thought vets and farmers would fund vaccination long-term.
In response to Mr Zellweger's arguments, a Defra spokesman said it did not appear to have ‘any basis in existing research', whereas the vaccine development and badger vaccine deployment project were ‘underpinned' by research findings.
Defra said there was no suggestion that trapping badgers caused perturbation or that vaccinating infected badgers caused them to excrete more or less TB.
Level of infection a serious challenge
DESCRIBING how Switzerland had eradicated TB, Ueli Zellweger said all reservoirs of infection were isolated and closed down.
He said the badger was the ‘most serious reservoir' in the UK, but the bigger challenge was that the overall level of infection in all species was very high.
Switzerland started its eradication programme from a much lower level of infection, something Christianne Glossop, chief veterinary officer for Wales, said the UK should have done in the 1980s.
Speaking at the conference preceding Beef Expo, she said: “It's not ideal that we're starting from the point where we are now.”
But the predominantly English audience listened in envy to her plans involving £27.7 million of
extra Welsh Assembly funding. She said the badger cull would not work on its own, but was a vital part of a wider plan.
When asked about the public's reaction to the cull, she said things were ‘eerily quiet' with tens of letters, rather than the tens of thousands seen when Wales first considered a cull a year ago and Defra went to consultation.
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