Badgers

there is an endemic yes, and hopefully you are right eventually vaccinations will be the way to go and culling can become a thing of the past. i don’t know how well the vaccine works, if it is as the human BCG which does not prevent TB in all cases. But works best against the most severe forms of disease, such as TB meningitis. So they don’t actually know how effective it is, or will be, long term yet. So as it stands we don’t know it will even work, or to what extent, i believe a couple of small trials have happened with success, but they have also done many other things on these particular, i believe smallholdings to support it.
They may have done more recent larger trials by now i don’t know.
But I haven’t read anything recent on the vaccine results or improvements to comment other than that. But yes i hope long term for everyone involved they will be able to go down this route.

there is a BCG vaccine which i believe is still illegal, because the tb testing can’t differentiate between a tb infected or tb vaccinated animal. I think like the human BCG it isn’t completely effected approx 60 to 70%, but i think it is something they are also developing. I am sure i read somewhere the government has withdrawn some funding of vaccine trials too which is a concern if this is the case, but whatever we are still talking, down the line rather than now.

ok 500 a week words my apologies, i’m sure some weeks it would be in the hundreds and some weeks in the thousands to reach a 26,000 level a year but i am just being pedantic back to be fair, i was going to put thousands a year initially, but went to change it to hundreds a week and ended up with hundreds and thousands a week “my bad”. i should check what i’ve typed when having an emotional response to something more carefully. But as you have probably noticed i babble like i’m talking, and i know it does go on alot lol.
But we do need to do something now, before it gets any worse, even just to keep it in check until we can sort vaccines, which i hope truly will be the answer long term.

@jen_jen wrote:

Are cattle vaccinated against TB?
If not, why not?
And if they are, then surely it isn’t a problem?

Or is that too simple and I’m missing something? :?

Putting a man on the moon is simple, Jen.

However, sorting out a bovine equivalent of a vaccination that is already in place for humans is apparently, far too difficult. :wink:

@panda12 wrote:

@wordsworth60 wrote:

http://www.defra.gov.uk/animal-diseases/a-z/bovine-tb/

Here’s DEFRA’s info on the subject. 26,000 a year is a lot of cattle, but it’s not “hundreds of thousands every week” by a long chalk. Granted your post was sarcy f_pol, but your point was spoilt for me by the sarcasm and the exaggeration.

The reason for protecting badgers is not their ‘cuteness’. Bees, for example, are not cute in my mind, but essential to the ecosystem. Maybe badgers are useless appendages to nature that can be harmlessly discarded, but that is not being argued.

I just hope this isn’t another huge mistake. My gut instinct is pessimistic.

Well done Words for putting things into perspective using reasoning and facts as opposed to hysterical scaremongering.

Just wanting to point out that 26,000 a year equates to 500 animals a week on average so in the course of a week hundreds or thousands could quite well be put to slaughter, no scaremongering involved, so hundreds and thousand on differing weeks is perfectly accurate, i did not say hundreds of thousands just to clear that up. But if thats the only thing you can come up with in defence of the culling, picking holes in some wording that i made, even though in fact it is accurate when u look closely, i guess culling is going to have to be the answer for now, as much as i’d hope that wasn’t the case.