TUESDAY 16 MARCH 1999

MR BRIAN DICKINSON, MR JIM SCUDAMORE, DR CHRIS CHEESEMAN and DR GLYN HEWINSON

  600. So you are not going to wait for that?
  (Mr Scudamore) No.

  601. You are going to get on with this?
  (Mr Scudamore) Work will be put out on the existing information, and we have a lot of information off the previous form.

  602. And how does this work relate to the work commissioned by the Milk Development Council?
  (Mr Scudamore) This is very similar work, but the Milk Development Council, I cannot remember the exact details, are looking into the information we have, and I think they will be looking at a postal survey; we will also be looking at a multivariate analysis of the information collected.

  603. So these are being meshed together so that there is not going to be a duplication of data collection and a duplication of effort?
  (Mr Scudamore) No; the intention is to try to get the best analysis of the data we already have.
  (Mr Dickinson) Essentially, I think, the purpose is that the Milk Development Council will carry out a survey of husbandry practices to supplement what we have got off the TB49s, and so that should give an improved analysis from that data.

  604. You mentioned that, in the control areas where there is not a TB outbreak, you would use a stripped-down version of this form; do not go into detail on this, because it is a long form, but tell me roughly which bits you are going to be leaving out from that process?
  (Mr Scudamore) They are still working on the form that will be used for the control areas, but I suspect the parts that would be left out would be the management parts; in other words, because there is not any incidence of disease there is no point collecting details of incidence, there would be no point collecting necessarily detailed movement records. So that form, I think, will be used mainly for data collection and epidemiology, and not management of outbreaks.

  605. No, but, presumably, it certainly will relate to the issues of animal husbandry and the management of cattle movements, and so on?
  (Mr Scudamore) This is the absolutely crucial point, that if you take a parish with 20 herds, then you find that you have got two with disease and 18 without, you want to know why the two went down with disease; if you have got a parish with 20 herds and you have got ten with disease and ten without, you want to find out why the ten did not go down with disease. So I think all the factors which have been mentioned—badgers, wildlife, husbandry, feeding, concurrent disease, stress factors—are absolutely crucial; so those would have to be collected in the control negative farms.

  606. What steps are you taking to ensure that this survey is not a subjective process; the people filling it in, I think you mentioned vets, how are they being trained to use this, to ensure that they do not allow their own personal opinions on this matter to intrude too much into the data collection process?
  (Mr Scudamore) I think that is a very valid point, because it is crucial that they do look at it with an open mind, and this is why we will be running training sessions for these staff; and, secondly, we have developed an instruction manual to go with the form, to explain what they look at and what they put in. A lot of the questions are just self-explanatory, do they grow maize or do they not grow maize, what acreage. The one that has been left out is assigning an origin to the outbreak; so, unlike the previous form, where the vet had to say it was movements, or badgers, or something else, that has been left out on this form. So we have tried to make it as objective as possible, and I think the training and the guidance to the staff will be the crucial thing on that.

  607. From your own observations, which husbandry practices do you think have most effect, this surely should have come out from previous surveys; which animal husbandry practices had most effect on whether a farm suffered TB or not?
  (Mr Scudamore) I think there is a whole range of points there, but I think the most important one is, if you have got badgers and you believe that is the cause of TB, and you have got cattle that get TB, it has got to get from the badgers to the cattle, so the husbandry factors would be commonsense factors to reduce any potential spread, even though you do not have detailed knowledge of the transmission. So I think commonsense has to be used, wherever possible, till, hopefully, all this experimental work will give us much more detail. So all the ideas in previous leaflets, in terms of contact between cattle and badgers, would be particularly relevant at the badger level, and then you have the standard biosecurity factors and other factors we will not have been looking at.

  608. Krebs felt that the advice that had been given out in the leaflets had not had a great deal of impact on farmers' behaviour; is that your view?
  (Mr Scudamore) I think that is probably true.

  609. Why do you think that might be?
  (Mr Scudamore) We are getting into the realms of speculation, I think, but possibly there are two reasons. One is that they were speculative, there is no proof, a lot of the measures are commonsense; and I think pragmatic, hard-headed businessmen might want to see proof that measures are going to work and that they had been backed up by science.

  610. Even though the consequences of getting this wrong are disastrous to a businessman's livelihood?
  (Mr Scudamore) Exactly; that is the important point, that they would look at it and say there is no proof so they will not do it. But when I look back on the diseases we have eradicated, we have actually dealt with a lot of diseases without proof on how they were spread or what caused them. So I think that is not a very valid point. The second point is the cost of doing that. Now some of the things would be reasonably cost-effective, but, for example, one suggestion to prevent cow to cow spread is that you need six feet between you and your neighbour's herd; to put in an electric fence, or double fencing, could be pretty expensive, so I think cost does have quite an impact on the measures. But, personally, I think that general security on the farm, plus commonsense measures, should be implemented.

  611. The application of slurry has been suggested as a possible reason for TB spreading; that did not feature in the guidance given by MAFF: why not?
  (Mr Scudamore) The question of how long the mycobacterium survives in slurry is an open-ended figure. Some of the research suggests it can last in faeces for five to six months in the winter; other research is that if you spread slurry onto fields it disappears within 60 days. But I think the advice we would give farmers would be that they should not put animals to graze where they have put slurry in the previous six months.

  612. And that advice was published and given to farmers, was it?
  (Mr Scudamore) I think it was discussed; if I recollect, it would have been discussed when the veterinary officer was on the farm. But it is a valid point, and we are in the process of redoing these leaflets, and the intention is that—

  613. Certainly, I obtained some of these leaflets myself from farmers in my constituency, I did not notice any guidance on that subject in those publications?
  (Mr Scudamore) There is guidance on slurry disposal on land, but it might be in a different forum, there are various leaflets on the use of slurry, the fact that you should not put slurry onto land that cattle are going to graze within a certain period of time. But I think the intention would be to bring all that into the new leaflets we are preparing for guidance to farmers.

  614. Might this not be another indication of the rather ham-fisted way in which MAFF have tackled this subject in the past?
  (Mr Scudamore) I do not think so. There has been a lot of advice given out to farmers on slurry, and, as I say, when one is dealing with an outbreak of disease one would discuss what they do with slurry, from the outbreak itself. There have also been various booklets and leaflets on slurry, in terms of other risks, some lower risks, heavy metal risks, all sorts of risks, so there has been a lot of information out. I think, where you might be right in the criticism, it has not been all brought together into one place, and I think that is the intention of the new leaflets.

  Chairman: A number of my colleagues are trying to ask supplementaries on this issue, but what I am actually going to do is, I am going to move on to the next subject area, because we have got one or two other very important areas left to ask about, then I hope there will be time to come back to them at the end. We must make sure we give good time to Mr George's next questions about the culling trial itself; but I will then come back, I hope, if there is time at the end.

  615. Thank you, Mr Chairman. Looking at the Krebs experiment and the culling trial proposals, are you satisfied with the rigour of the methodology and that it will provide, at the end of it all, a clear answer to the relationship between badgers and bovine TB?
  (Mr Dickinson) This is not just a question of the methodology, of course, it is partly a question about the influences upon the trial. And I think we have recognised, from the start, that there are some external influences which will influence how successful it is; in particular, the degree of co-operation from landowners, which has, so far, been high, the question of any illegal culling, particularly in the control areas, the `survey only' areas, and any interference with the culling, with the trial as a whole. So those are external factors beyond us, well, not wholly beyond us but partly beyond us. Within the trial, of course, we have to impose our own constraints as to how we go about the job, the decisions not to use snares on welfare grounds, to have a closed season, the way in which we go about the trapping, are obviously of that kind; but, overall, we think that they will be sufficient to give us a reasonably successful trapping rate, and we are content with that aspect. Beyond that, you then come on to the range of variables at which we are looking, and here, I think, we come back almost to the fact that we have got a very wide range of things here, cattle to cattle transmission, badger to cattle transmission, other wildlife, the question of production systems, the precautions that are taken by way of husbandry, of climate, or terrain, whether there is a previous history of TB on the farm, there is a host of factors of that kind. And, if you look at any of these in isolation, you might say there are other confounding factors which make it more difficult to identify the effect of that particular factor you are concerned about. Well, all I would say is that these are variables which we normally do tackle by full epidemiological and statistical analysis, and all the advice we have had from the Independent Scientific Group is that they are content that they can actually deal adequately with that through the trial as it has now been designed. I think we will follow that advice. Obviously, if we could improve the power of the trial we would, but there is always the question about how you could actually achieve that.

  616. So would you say that the most important thing is the methodology itself, or the fact that the proposed experiment can be implemented rigorously; in other words, is it the rigour of implementation, or is there some magic formula in the methodology itself which is of prime importance?
  (Mr Dickinson) I think it is important to make the methodology as rigorous as we can make it, and for that reason we want to have sound operating procedures which do introduce rigour to make the trials of the different areas of each triplet as valid as possible by making the areas similar, and in other ways generally to try to make sure that we can operate in the most effective fashion. But I do not think you can pick out any single feature as being the most important. I think one which worries us most, obviously, are the external factors, in the end.

  617. Talking about external factors, would you not agree that, in those areas where all badgers are being culled, the proactive areas, there is some evidence that the setts are then recolonised possibly by infected badgers, that your removing healthy badgers is actually adding to the problems in those areas?
  (Mr Dickinson) That is a traditional risk. I do not know whether, Chris, you would like to comment on that.
  (Dr Cheeseman) Yes. It is expected that the proactive culling areas will be recolonised. You have got to remember, firstly, that the level of culling is probably only 80 per cent, at best, so that 20 per cent of the badgers that were originally there are left behind; they are mostly trap-shy animals, or perhaps they just were not available to be trapped, they were living in setts that were not found, or were not even surveyed, because there are a few sets in these areas that we have not—

  618. Was that 20 per cent, you are saying?
  (Dr Cheeseman) Twenty per cent is what we estimate will be left behind.

  619. There were a few setts in the area, you were saying?
  (Dr Cheeseman) A few setts in the area that MAFF has not been given, they are on land to which MAFF has not been given access, so there will be badgers in those areas as well.