This is a subscriber-only article
The total cost of the NI bovine TB programme went up £1m in 2018 to total £38.8m.
Each of the various costs across the year is included in a DAERA annual TB report published at the end of last month.
The figures do not include co-funding received from the EU, which in 2017 amounted to £5.75m. At the time of writing, the NI share of co-funding received by the UK was yet to be confirmed, but assuming it is similar, it means a net cost around the £33m mark.
The major outlay is compensation for reactor animals, which came to £23.6m last year. That figure is virtually unchanged from 2017.
During 2018, there were 15,329 reactors found at a test (a 3.9% decrease), along with 999 cattle slaughtered as “negative in-contacts” and 625 voluntarily slaughtered by farmers as a result of a positive reaction to the interferon gamma blood test.
In total, therefore, the Department paid out compensation on 16,953 cattle, at an average of £1,390. In return, there is a salvage value at slaughter, and most reactors do end up in the food chain, albeit in lower value markets.
In total, the Department got £4.77m back, which works out at an average of £280/head.
However, with TB compensation costs similar to 2017, the reason for the overall increase in 2018 is due to more testing on the back of the recent spike in TB. The herd incidence (the number of new reactor herds as a proportion of the total that tested) hit 9.73% in November 2017, the highest rate seen since 2002.
Even though cattle numbers were down marginally in 2018, a total of 3.25m animal tests were completed, an increase of 4.5%.
That resulted in higher private vet TB-testing costs, which totalled £8.51m in 2018, an increase of over £1m on 2017. Bovine TB remains an important source of income for private veterinary practices in NI.
Also up is the cost that DAERA attributes to its own veterinary and administrative staff working on bovine TB, which went from £7.55m in 2017 to £7.83m in 2018.
Other lesser costs include £1.32m to vets directly employed by DAERA to do testing, £724,105 on tuberculin, £721,316 on TB-related research, £533,114 on laboratory analysis and just under £400,000 going to hauliers.
Slaughter
While the vast majority of reactor animals are picked up by a conventional TB test, there are also those that are found at slaughter.
Of the 440,236 local cattle slaughtered in NI in 2018, a total of 1,826 (4.1%) had TB suspect lesions, and had samples submitted for further laboratory examination. That is an increase of 7.2% on the 2017 figure, and resulted in 644 herds having restrictions applied.
In total, 60% of the suspect cattle picked up at slaughter were confirmed as reactors in the lab, leading to 370 herds being classified as TB breakdown herds. Of these, 247 herds had at least one or more reactors at a subsequent test.
2019
As reported last month, the number of TB reactors this year is down significantly on both 2018 and 2017. Best estimates are that this should result in a reduction of £4.5m in overall programme costs for 2019.
SHARING OPTIONS: