Badger cull: Vets criticise Defra for ‘untrue statements’
Vets from the Prion Interest Group said there is ‘no proof whatsoever’ that changes in the incidence of bTB in cattle in the cull zones are linked to badger culling.
Vets have criticised Defra for making ‘insupportable claims’ that the badger cull is working, and have sought a retraction or revision of the statements.
Writing in Vet Record, vets from the Prion Interest Group said there is ‘no proof whatsoever’ that changes in the incidence of bTB in cattle in the cull zones are linked to badger culling.
Last month Defra provided a statement to Radio 4’s Farming Today programme, stating that recent data show initial badger culls in the higher risk area have had ‘a positive impact on disease incidence’.
However, vets said that the APHA report to which this refers states: ‘these data alone cannot demonstrate whether the badger control policy is effective in reducing bovine TB in cattle’. Furthermore, the incidence and prevalence of bTB had been falling in Gloucestershire and Somerset for three years before culling began.
They continued: 'The claimed changes in incidence, even if valid, would be within the fluctuations of normal variation, and as no data was published from matched control areas to mitigate for confounding factors and extant trends, linking any claimed fall in officially tuberculosis free status-withdrawn (OTF-W) incidence to badger culling is entirely unjustified.’
Defra responded to the vets’ assertions on Farming Today by saying: ‘Calling our calculation of the rate of new bTB cases “opaque and impossible to confirm independently without raw data” is simply incorrect’. Also last month, farming minister George Eustice stated to parliament in a similar vein: “As well as the headline incidence rate and prevalence, the raw data that underpins these calculations was also published”.
Vets said Defra itself stated in February 2015 that changing to the use of 100 herd-years at risk as a measure for calculating incidence, is that it is ‘not calculable from the published data set because the actual dates herds were tested and the test result (positive or negative) is required to calculate the denominator’.
In addition, although much of the data has been published, ‘key data necessary for the calculation of incidence are absent,’ they added.
Vets concluded by saying: ‘The issuing by Defra of untrue statements which cannot be justified by the data on which they rely, sets an extremely dangerous precedent, since they will undoubtedly be used to justify the continued roll-out of a policy which will result in the suffering and death of many thousands of animals.”
They are calling on the chief veterinary officer to examine the statements and seek immediate and public retraction by Defra, or a revision to reflect what can truly be inferred by examining the data.
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