Badger Culling/Bovine TB Debate
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Nick Thomas-Symonds
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Badger Culling/Bovine TB
Nick Thomas-Symonds Excerpts(8 years, 2 months ago)
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Dr Paul Monaghan (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (SNP)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered Badger culling and bovine TB.
Bovine tuberculosis—bTB—is a disease affecting beef and dairy cattle herds in England and Wales. Scotland is officially free of the disease and Wales is increasingly considered to be bringing the disease under control, but its incidence is rising in England.
Bovine tuberculosis is caused by the organism Mycobacterium bovis, which is excreted by infected cattle on to the land they graze where it survives in the soil. It can be and is then passed to other cattle and other species, including badgers, rats, cats, deer, foxes, moles, hedgehogs, worms and, I understand, even flies. However, the predominant mode of transmission in cattle is nose to nose and of course through trading, which promotes it between herds.
In recent years, the disease has spread extensively northwards and eastwards from the areas of original prevalence in the south-west of England, and that spread continues. In fact, the number of new herd breakdowns appears to double approximately every nine years, and in the last decade alone the UK Government has slaughtered 314,000 otherwise healthy cattle in an attempt to control the disease.
Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the spread he is talking about would be far better controlled by regular cattle testing than by a cull, which is simply not cost-effective and is inhumane?
Dr Monaghan
The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point and I will come to it shortly.
In 2013, more than 6 million bTB skin tests were performed in England in an attempt to identify the disease, leading to the slaughter of more than 26,000 cattle. These tests are only 20% to 50% effective. One quarter of herds in the south-west and west midlands regions of England have been placed under movement restrictions at some point, and in the last decade the rising incidence of the disease has cost the UK taxpayer more than £500 million. Today, 20% of all new herd breakdowns are detected in the slaughterhouse, such is the ineffectiveness of current testing programmes.