The current measures being taken by farmers, the Department and by Europe will not be enough to eradicate TB by 2030, a Department of Agriculture/IFA meeting held in Gort, Co Galway, heard last week.

Philip Breslin from the Department of Agriculture said that dairy herds and large herds have a higher inherent risk for having TB and that risk is continuing to get higher as these types of herds increase in Irish cattle farming.

“There’s also a threat to European co-funding. They used to pay us over €12m – that’s down now to about €9m. I was out at a disease taskforce meeting in March in Brussels and they were talking about the diseases that they fund and it was all about African swine fever and rabies.

“Since the accession of the eastern [European] countries, the emphasis has changed completely and TB wasn’t on the agenda at all,” he said.

When asked from the floor why we can’t vaccinate cattle against TB, Breslin said that there are a number of reasons, including that there is no licensed product to vaccinate cattle currently available.

Badgers

On the badger culling programme, he said that when the infection level in badgers is up around 30%, there will be spillover into the cattle population, at fairly high rates.

When this is brought down to 10% or 15%, there isn’t as much spillover.

In Ireland there are about 2.5 badgers per square kilometre and when the removal programme is conducted it brings this density to about 0.5 badgers per square kilometre, he said.

“That reduction in the population removes diseased badgers and you’re also lessening the interaction that badgers have with each other so they’re not capable of cross-infecting themselves as much and in turn passing the infection on to cattle,” he said.

He said that for TB eradication to be realistically addressed by 2030 a number of changes need to be considered to support farmers in taking decisions which reduce their risk of TB, and which address the small number of herds which regularly have TB breakdowns.

The TB forum met on Wednesday to discuss issues around the costs and benefits of the TB eradication programme.