A new badger vaccination scheme has been launched as part of the government’s comprehensive strategy to make England bovine TB free.
Vaccination schemes were urged as a 'practical, cost-effective option' in dealing with tuberculosis by animal trusts instead of culling.
A badger vaccination report, published last month outlined the progress of 10 badger vaccination schemes over the past three years. These schemes have seen vaccinations given on Wildlife Trust nature reserves and privately-owned land, in partnership with farmers, vets and other landowners.
The Badger Edge Vaccination Scheme (BEVS) will support badger vaccination projects in areas outside the bovine TB high risk area. The edge area covers counties in the middle of the country such as Cheshire, Oxfordshire and Hampshire. These edge areas are most at risk of the disease spreading from the South West and West Midlands.
Vaccinating healthy badgers in this way is intended to help create a buffer zone of healthy badger populations to help curb the spread of TB in cattle.
The BEVS package of support includes a funding award of up to 50% of long term costs for vaccinating, vaccination advice from field experts, free loans of equipment such as traps, and free vaccine supply. Eligible vaccination projects need to be predominantly in the edge area, and will be required to cover a minimum area of approximately 15km2.
This vaccination scheme is just one element of our comprehensive strategy to achieve bovine TB free status in England by 2038. This includes strict cattle movement controls and also culling in areas where the disease is rife, which overseas experience shows is vital to beating the disease.
Farming Minister George Eustice said: "Bovine TB continues to be a huge threat to our beef and dairy farmers, our economy and our food security, which is why we are pursuing a comprehensive strategy to beat it. As part of this, I want to see vaccination groups come together, building on prior experience to deliver badger vaccination in the edge area. This could be an important part of our collective efforts, to prevent the spread of this terrible disease in cattle to new areas of the country."
Nigel Gibbens, UK Chief Veterinary Officer said: "I would urge groups to take advantage of this vaccination offer and join in with this important effort to halt the disease spreading throughout England. We know vaccination cannot cure badgers already carrying TB, but used in the right areas, it can play a vital role in creating a barrier to the disease’s spread."
The British Veterinary Association (BVA), which said it would support the second year of pilot culls in England, welcomed the launch of the Badger Edge Vaccination Scheme (BEVS).
“BVA welcomes the Secretary of State’s announcement of Government support for badger vaccination projects in the edge areas separating the high and low risk areas of bovine TB, that will be delivered on the ground through local partnerships including wildlife groups, farmers and veterinary surgeons," said BVA President Robin Hargreaves.
“We have long argued there is no one single measure that will tackle bovine TB, and it is therefore important that a vaccination strategy is not deployed in isolation but delivered in conjunction with other key elements of the strategy.
"We fully support the comprehensive eradication strategy for England that utilises all of the available measures, including targeted badger vaccination in the edge area, targeted and humane culling in the high risk area, strict cattle controls, and improved biosecurity.
“Area-based strategies have an important role to play in efforts to control and eradicate the disease across the UK. Recent post-mortem evidence from road killed badgers in Cheshire, one of the counties in the edge area, shows provisional 24% infection rates among badgers, which may indicate that the edge is advancing and thus illustrates the urgency of dealing with bovine TB in both high risk and edge areas.”
"Badger culling is a necessary part of a comprehensive bovine TB eradication strategy that also includes strict cattle measures and vaccination. Culling remains a hugely emotive issue but we must tackle the disease in both cattle and wildlife. Scientific evidence supports the use of targeted, humane badger culling to achieve a reduction in the disease in cattle."
Paul Wilkinson, Head of Living Landscape for The Wildlife Trusts, said: “We have been working on the issue of bovine TB (bTB) and its links to badgers for many years. We work very closely with the farming community, as well as being significant farmers and landowners in our own right, and are very conscious of the hardship that bTB causes. Culling badgers is not the answer; it won’t significantly reduce disease prevalence in cattle and could even make the situation worse, due to the perturbation effect where the disease is spread by badgers moving between setts post-cull.
“It is vital that we find the right mechanisms to control this disease and the emphasis of all our efforts should be to find an effective, long-term solution.
“We firmly believe that vaccination offers the most effective, long-term and sustainable approach to bTB in badgers, and there is a strong scientific evidence base supporting this view. However, addressing the disease in badgers can at best make a limited contribution to the eradication of bTB in cattle.
“Cattle to cattle transmission represents the most important route of disease spread, so it is vital that the main focus of the Government’s strategy to eradicate bTB remains on cattle measures, as this is where the most significant disease-control gains will be made.”
Debbie Tann, CEO of Hampshire & Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust said: “We are classified as being in an “edge” area in Hampshire and so our strategy locally has been to focus our badger vaccinations on sites that pose the highest potential risk. Thanks to the generosity of our members we raised £45,000 through an appeal and begun vaccinating on four sites this year.”
Humane Society International UK warned that unless the scheme is available in ‘high risk’ bTB areas, and until DEFRA and the NFU actively counter their own anti-vaccination rhetoric, the scheme will have limited impact.
Mark Jones, veterinarian and executive director of HSI UK, said: “We’re pleased that DEFRA has finally admitted that badger vaccination is a useful tool, but it will be too little too late unless ministers pull out all the stops to promote it to the very farmers they and the National Farmers Union have spent years trying to convince that badger vaccination is a waste of time. Ministers have downplayed the value of badger vaccination in recent years, in an attempt to boost support for a cull, and that negative messaging risks undermining the scheme even before it has begun. If DEFRA now wants to get buy-in from those same farmers for vaccination of badgers on their land, it needs to seriously change its rhetoric.
“But more than that, it needs to promote badger vaccination in the high-risk areas where it will actually make the greatest difference. Refusing to support vaccination in precisely those areas where bovine TB is most problematic is nonsensical. So farmers in these areas deserve a vaccination scheme or they’re being left high and dry. We know that indiscriminate culling of badgers won’t be effective. Last year’s cull was a waste of time, money and badgers’ lives that DEFRA seems sadly determined to repeat this year. Unlike the cull, science tells us that vaccinating even a modest proportion of badgers undoubtedly reduces the potential for TB to spread within badger populations and therefore back to cattle."
HSI UK also believes that DEFRA’s edge area scheme risks failing to gain sufficient uptake from volunteer groups that are motivated by actions that will be prevent culling. Vaccinating badgers in edge areas where culling was never due to happen in the first place will prove a far harder sell to wildlife volunteers.
“Bovine TB is a problem created by the farming industry,” said Jones. “So it’s time for farmers to take ownership of effective and humane solutions to their problem, instead of indiscriminately shooting badgers and by doing so potentially making the problem worse. Improving farm biosecurity and restricting cattle movements are crucial, but badger vaccination is also a very useful tool, so we encourage landowners and farmers to get proactively involved and push DEFRA to expand its funding to include high risk areas. All stakeholders – farmers, the tax payer and wildlife groups – have much to gain from a badger vaccination initiative, but it needs to be done intelligently otherwise all those same stakeholders will lose out.”
