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Farming Today this morning had an interesting piece on new research which is successfully analysing the area immediately surrounding badger setts, identifying those setts which contain badgers affected or carrying TB. With pre-movement testing coming into force on Monday together with this new way of being able to ensure that only affected animals are destroyed (whether they are badgers or cattle) at long last I can see a really positive way of eliminating TB in hot spots such as the area I live in.

No averagely intelligent person wants to see mass exterminations of badger but again, nor does any farmer want to see their animals infected with TB and then slaughtered (and before anyone mentions it, the new compensation figures are nowhere near the true market values). So if, at long last, a method of selective and moreover, accurate culling of animals actually infected with the blasted disease can be implemented, there would seem to be light at the end of the tunnel.....

However, knowing how slowly DEFRA works, I don't hold out a lot of hope that this will be quickly acted upon. Well, certainly not if it goes the same way as the distribution of Single Farm Payments is anything to go by!
 
Can you explain Julie why cows can't be vaccinated against TB as humans can ? I haven't ever heard an explanation why .
 
It is something to do with tests for TB. Cattle who have been vaccinated for TB will show up the same as an infected animal.
 
An effective vaccine for cattle is being developed but is about 6 - 8 years off, James and, as Mel says, it has first to be proved via trials to be completely effective before being released, otherwise even weith the new gamma interferoontest, the results will be confused.

They are further forward with an effective vaccine for badgers, I believe, than for cattle but te real problem is then how do you adminster it?
 
There's a bloke round here eats badger meat, collects dead bodies off the road and keeps it in his freezer along with rabbits,deer etc.
 
Originally posted by Diamond Geezer@Mar 24 2006, 05:55 PM
There's a bloke round here eats badger meat, collects dead bodies off the road and keeps it in his freezer along with rabbits,deer etc.
Click to expand...
:blink:

I'm led to believe there's quite of bit badger baiting that goes on round my area, although I think in certain places its something that will go on quite a bit.
 
I love to see the badgers about but there are simply too many of them and that definitely leads to increased diseases of all sorts in the badger population, as pressure increases on territory.

Also, the situation that exists where we aren't allowed to limit the area that badger setts cover drives me up the wall - I've two fields now where the badgers have extended way out into the fields and we've had to electric fence of large areas because it would be so easy for a horse to put its leg down the hole and break it.
 
Can't the vaccines simply be administered like polio vaccines, on a lump of sugar? I'd have thought that supplying a sett with sugar lumps thus treated would effectively stop the disease, full stop. Why is everything so bloody slow? It's surely not as if TB hasn't been around in animals as long as it is in humans. Mobile phones have gone from the size of half-bricks to the tiniest, all-filming, all-texting marvels they are today in a few short years. Why is medicine so far behind other technologies?
 
I have to admit to being amazed that vaccines are so far off when for humans the BCG has been around for such a long time
 
Yes, Troodles, an excellent point, and true - anything we get vaccinated with now has been jabbed into thousands of mice and monkeys beforehand!
 
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