Sunday 18 November 2018

Badger culling has 'modest' effect in cutting cattle TB



By Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent, BBC News
13 November 2018
An independent scientific review has said that badger culling can have a "modest" effect in reducing cattle TB.
But it adds that the policy would lead to more than 40,000 badgers being culled a year.
The report says that such high levels of culling may not be publicly acceptable.
The authors urge the government to accelerate the development of non-lethal controls, such as vaccination.
The findings were published in a review led by Prof Sir Charles Godfray of Oxford University.
But one expert said the report had little to say about the effectiveness of the current badger culls.
The report was commissioned by Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, in February.
He asked an independent group of scientists to review Defra's strategy for controlling the spread of tuberculosis (TB) in cattle. According to Prof Godfray he was "explicitly asked" not to look at the effectiveness of the current culls.
Instead Prof Godfray and his team drew on the results of the Randomised Badger Control Trials carried out between 1998 and 2007.


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