There is quite a lot of movement of cattle from high-risk TB herds to low-risk herds and if Ireland is to eradicate TB then that must be dealt with, Dr John Griffin, chair of the scientific working group of the TB Forum has said.

“If there is to be a successful eradication programme then we need to deal with that. By high-risk herd I mean a herd that may recently have had an outbreak of tuberculosis and has just gone free.

“There is loads of evidence to show that those herds can still have some infected animals because the test is not 100%. There can still be some infected animals in those herds,” he said, in response to questions from Roscommon-Galway TD Michael Fitzmaurice at the Oireachtas committee on agriculture last week.

Dr Griffin said that if Ireland were to adopt a regional approach to eradicate the disease, two things must be done.

“First, you must completely rid the region of TB. Second, you must then stop infection from coming into that region because there is no point in getting rid of infection and then have loads of infection coming back. Those two requirements must be met.

“To meet the first requirement, we are talking about high-quality testing and so on to get rid of the disease. To prevent it from coming back in, the two main sources of TB for herds must be prevented. These are wildlife and other cattle,” he said.

He said it was the view of the working group that the main method of transmission of TB in Ireland is transmission between cattle.

From a scientific point of view there is absolutely no reason why Ireland can’t eradicate TB in cattle, Dr Griffin said.