A new weapon in the fight against TB is emerging, with vaccination now confirmed to prevent healthy badgers getting the disease under natural farm conditions.

The Department of Agriculture is conducting widespread trials to confirm that the protection of the badger population will, in turn, reduce TB incidence in nearby cattle herds, the Irish Farmers Journal can reveal.

So confident is the Department of this new approach that it says it intends to incorporate badger vaccination in its eradication programme. But this, Minister for Agriculture Michael Creed said, depends on vaccination being as effective as the current strategy of removal of diseased badgers.

It also depends on identifying a suitable and cost-effective bait for delivering vaccine to badgers and on getting regulatory approval for this use of a vaccine.

The Department is already collaborating with UCD and with its British equivalent – DEFRA – on preparing a dossier for submission to regulatory authorities and also on identifying an effective vaccine bait.

Department experts believe that a mixed strategy of removal of infected badgers alongside vaccination of healthy ones could be the quickest and most cost-effective way of eradicating bovine TB.

The minister will this week present the results of the large-scale field trial on badger vaccination which took place on farms in Co Kilkenny, with the research led by UCD.

The follow-up trials to confirm the subsequent protection given to cattle are already under way on farms in six locations.

Meanwhile, preparations are under way to reduce deer numbers in east Wicklow, where overpopulation is blamed for high levels of TB in the deer population and in cattle herds.

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Full coverage: bovine TB