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The absence of an assembly at Stormont and a minister in place at DAERA is stopping a badger cull from being rolled out in two bovine TB hotspot areas in NI, DAERA chief vet Robert Huey has said.
In a seminar at the National Beef Association (NBA) Beef Expo event in Dungannon, Huey maintained that in order to undertake badger intervention work, evidence is needed that the animals are infected with TB and have the same strain of TB as reactor cattle in the area.
“We can do that, that’s what we have been doing this winter in Aghadowey and Omagh,” he said on Monday. Both areas were surveyed by the department in recent months, with badger setts mapped and 19 badgers in each area blood-sampled.
“If I get an Assembly back and get a minister to make decisions, we are in a position to move forward with this as soon as we possibly can. It is the nature of democracy that I advise politicians and politicians make these decisions. I cannot make these decisions,” Huey said.
During his presentation, the chief vet said that the cost of the TB eradication programme in NI will run £3.5m over budget this year and will total £40.5m. The biggest proportion of that is the cost of compensation for reactor animals, which has almost doubled in five years from £12.5m to £24.5m on the back of more TB reactors and higher compensation values due to rising beef prices.
During his presentation, Huey emphasised that a new approach was needed to tackling TB and that increasing TB rates is not good for the NI livestock industry as new markets are sought after Brexit. “We need to do something about this. This is a bad time to be where we are,” he acknowledged.
The recommendations put forward in December 2016 by the TB Strategic Partnership Group were described by Huey as “38 sensible ones in my view”. However, he reiterated that even though a public consultation has been conducted, the proposals cannot be taken forward without a DAERA minister.
Skin test
One area of the TB eradication programme that Huey said did not need a rethink was the skin test. “It is a test that is actually very good and has been with us for about 100 years,” he told farmers at the NBA event.
Huey said that the test has a specificity of around 99.9%, which means if an animal reacts then it almost certainly has TB. However, the problem is that it has a sensitivity of only 50% under standard interpretation, which means it misses half of TB-infected animals in a herd.
“If we apply severe interpretation of a TB test, sensitivity increases from 50% to 70%, but when we do that we run the risk of taking animals that don’t actually have TB,” he acknowledged.
However, severe interpretation has been widely used in NI for several years. Huey said that DAERA vets must now justify to him why they have not used severe interpretation when reading a herd test, whereas previously, it was the other way around.
Lesions
Huey also maintained that if a reactor animal has no visible lesions in a post-mortem examination, it does not mean it did not have TB.
In the past, it was thought that an animal with no visible lesions was less likely to be infectious to others, as TB had not fully developed. Recent analysis of results has dismissed that theory.
This development was the basis for the department’s decision last September to reduce the number of no visible lesion reactors allowed in a herd from five reactors to two before Officially TB Withdrawn (OTW) status is applied.
Once OTW status is in place, a farmer must have two clear tests before it is lifted. Previously, a farmer who had up to five cattle with no visible lesions only had one clear test to complete.
The other recent change to policy has been to add in an extra test six months after a check herd test. The check herd test is normally conducted six months after a herd goes clear but, currently, reactors are detected in 10% of these check tests. A herd with a recent history of infection is more likely to have reactor animals in the future, so additional testing is required, argued Huey.
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