TUESDAY 16 MARCH 1999

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

  620. That was in the Putford trial, was it?
  (Dr Cheeseman) I think there were a few areas in the Putford culling area that were not trapped, but they are a rather small percentage of the whole area. Now the area will be recolonised, but the plan is to retrap it at intervals, six to nine months, in the first instance, and then annually thereafter, for the full five years. So the effect of that culling regime will be to maintain the badger population at a low level, it will not be zero but it will be at a low level. And, as for the infection status of badgers that recolonise the area, you are quite right, some of these badgers will be infected, they could pick up residual infection from the setts that they occupy. But that is really an irrelevance, because the whole purpose of the trial is to discover what effect this culling regime has on the incidence of the disease in cattle; that is what really interests us, at the end of the day.

  621. Right; but farmers and wildlife groups are very concerned about the speed with which this is being integrated. How soon will the ten triplets be set up; is there any way of speeding up the process?
  (Mr Dickinson) I think that is a very difficult question. We have obviously had to get off the ground a little bit more slowly than we would have liked, in the first year. We would like to have started two triplets fully last year, although we did enrol both of them; we would like to enrol four more this year, but I think we are doubtful about our ability to start trapping in all of them; and we would like to bring in the remainder next year. But it is going to depend, essentially, upon our ability to bring in the wildlife teams to operate in those areas, and the most important single constraint is actually recruiting and training the staff who will carry out the work on the ground.

  622. So you need more resources on the ground to recruit and train, in order to speed up the process?
  (Mr Dickinson) Yes, but we cannot simply use untrained staff to train the new staff.

  623. And how long does it take to train these staff; appointments were made for the Putford trial in December and you were acting pretty quickly thereafter, as I understand it?
  (Dr Cheeseman) I think there are 54 fully-trained staff on the ground at the moment. It takes about six months to get somebody fully competent in the field skills necessary to carry out the trapping and the surveying; it is quite a demanding job.

  624. But you would welcome more resources being made available, or can you ensure that more resources can be made available to speed up this process, get more trained staff out there in the field?
  (Mr Scudamore) I think the resources are not only the wildlife people collecting the badgers, it is also the laboratories examining the badgers, and that can be a constraint, because the badgers have to be moved from the trial areas to the veterinary laboratories and they have a limited resource there, which, to some extent, is constrained by Health and Safety requirements. So it is not just speeding up the number of people, it is getting the right number of people, getting them trained, getting the badgers removed to the right number of laboratories; and, overall, it would be, I think, quite difficult to increase that particular resource in the laboratories.

  625. But you could at least identify the triplet areas now and get things moving, you do not necessarily have to have the staff on the ground or the laboratories ready to take the experimental material, you could actually identify those areas now?
  (Mr Scudamore) I would agree with you, but we have discussed it with Professor Bourne, and I agree with him, where he says that we need to have up-to-date information, that to identify a triplet now, where we actually take action next year, TB does fluctuate, and what we want in the triplets is to have the most up-to-date information on the breakdowns in cattle herds within those triplets. So, I think, getting the balance between when we identify the triplets and when we start action is going to be quite important.

  626. But it would help in the strategy for controlling bovine TB in the areas outside the trial areas if you knew which areas were not going to be trialled, at this stage, you could be developing in that area?
  (Mr Scudamore) It depends what policy you develop outside the trial areas.
  (Mr Dickinson) I think that is the key thing. At the moment, it is not a constraint, because we do not have a policy for being active outside the trial areas; if we were to develop a policy for doing certain things outside the trial areas then, obviously, that would become important and we would then have to think much harder about identifying the remaining triplets.

  627. Could you shorten the five-year period for the trial in each of the triplet areas by simply increasing the replicates, the number of triplets, and therefore shortening the survey and experiment time?
  (Mr Dickinson) I think that, in principle, if you had more triplets then one would be able to get results faster, that must be the case. However, in practice, I think the fact that we have got other constraints, in terms of people on the ground and in terms of the laboratories' facilities, is actually going to limit our ability to expand in that way; and so there are very real constraints upon actually doing that.

  628. You have had a number of difficulties which you have referred to in the Putford area, in North Devon, with the first two trial areas; could you give an idea to the Committee on the level of non-compliance, the accuracy of the survey of badger numbers, because, after all, the badger groups in that area claim that you claimed that you should be able to trap and cull about 500, and you have given us a figure of between 200 and 240, and were pleased at the figure of 238. Can you clarify how satisfied you are with that particular trial?
  (Dr Cheeseman) I thought I had dealt with this point earlier.

  Chairman: I think you did, actually, Dr Cheeseman, I think you have dealt with it already.

  629. So you simply dispute the fact that the badger groups had claimed the figure of 500, which was widely reported in the area, and you are saying that you had never uttered a figure so high, at any stage?
  (Dr Cheeseman) The figure of 500 was actually just to make sure that a sufficient number of traps were deployed, and I think, with hindsight, it would probably have been better not to have put it on the Internet, because it led to the expectation that that number of badgers was going to be removed. And people have naturally taken the original estimate and the number of badgers removed and deduced that our culling operation was less than successful; that is not the case.

  630. Why was there no environmental impact assessment done in Putford before the culling began?
  (Dr Cheeseman) A desk study has been done on the environmental impact, and it was too early to mount a full environmental impact assessment before the cull was to take place. But there is going to be a full environmental impact study of the effects of proactive culling, which will be done on the back of the trial, as the triplets are recruited, and that is actually now under way. The next triplet to be trapped is being surveyed at this moment, to look at the abundance of the various species and ecological assemblages which we think may be affected by the removal of badgers; so that work is actually already under way.

  631. In your evidence to us, in paragraph 6.10, you say that the results of the lab studies on the Putford trial would not be available until late February; have you now got the results and have you had time to assess them?
  (Mr Dickinson) We have not seen full results of this yet, no.

  632. So when do you expect those results to be available?
  (Mr Dickinson) I think they are going to the Independent Scientific Group soon. I am afraid I am not able to be clear about the timetable, unless any of my colleagues know.
  (Dr Cheeseman) My understanding is about mid March, I think, because the cultures that are being done on the isolates from the badgers, I think, are going to take to about now to be complete, and so they should be available fairly shortly.

  Mr George: Are there any ways at all, having seen what has happened so far in the trial areas, any ways at all that you can recommend to Ministers or undertake action yourself to speed up the process?

  633. Can I perhaps ask a supplementary, while you are thinking about that, Mr Dickinson, because Dr Cheeseman said surveying was going on in the triplet area at present; in your evidence to us you said it would be completed in February. So that suggests another small slippage, at least, in that timetable?
  (Dr Cheeseman) Surveying is going on to look at the environmental impact; the surveying for the next triplet, that is not something that concerns me. My research team are actually undertaking the environmental impact work, and that is the surveying I was referring to.
  (Mr Dickinson) I think the basic answer is, if we could have thought of it we would have done it. I think that there are questions about how you actually get resources mobilised most effectively, how we get decisions taken in good time; we are anxious to make sure that they do get taken speedily.

  634. Can I ask, you talked about the resources, and it takes about six months to train personnel to do the work in the field, I wonder if you could explain why, on the advert for those personnel, it was necessary that they had gun skills?
  (Mr Scudamore) The advertisement was put out to get people who would be practical people who could do this job; we wanted country people, who knew the country, who could map-read, and they have to be able to catch the badgers in the cages and then they have to be shot. So they need to have skills, and, therefore, people who have those skills, or understand that, would be more appropriate for that type of job. They will get full training though, obviously, we are not going to rely on the skill they say they have.

  635. I am just interested that it was one of the major skills. All the process that you have talked about there, in the other kinds of work, it would seem that you were looking for, shall we say, somebody that was predisposed, not necessarily a country person, in rural areas not all country people have gun skills, by a long, long way, that you were looking for that as quite an important element of the work?
  (Dr Cheeseman) I think it is true that people who read the Shooting Times, where one of the adverts was placed, are the sort of people who look for perhaps keepering jobs, who would be looking for jobs that have a range of field skills. It is, basically, this particular job requires field craft, and certain people have that and certain people do not. I think it would be misrepresenting the sort of people who read the Shooting Times to suggest that they just have gun skills, and I think it is true that it was perhaps a reasonable choice of where to place an advert, because you would expect to get people applying for a job who would be looking for that type of employment that had those skills.

  636. The same thing is about the second triplet. I think the Chairman did ask the question about the slipping on the timetable on that, because we understood that the surveying, for that triplet, was originally going to be finished before Christmas. Is the surveying completed on the second triplet? And, secondly, I wonder if you could give us some figures on the non-compliance in that second triplet, what sort of percentage you have got, because you talked about, in the Putford area, the access to some of the setts was not available because of non-compliance? I wonder if you could give us some information on the progress there?
  (Dr Cheeseman) The survey actually on the next triplet is now complete.

  637. Right; and the non-compliance?
  (Dr Cheeseman) I do not know about the non-compliance.
  (Mr Dickinson) I am not sure. I have not heard it is any different from the first one, but I cannot give you the answer.
  (Dr Cheeseman) I think it is quite low.

  638. I wonder perhaps if we could ask for a formal indication of exactly what the level of non-compliance is, in the second triplet?
  (Mr Dickinson) Yes, indeed.

  639. Can we move on to talk about vaccine, because, two things here. One is that many of the badger groups and many of the other wildlife groups say that actually the total answer is just "Let's have a vaccine", that is the only way that we are really going to control this disease, it is the only sustainable control; and given, what Mr Dickinson has acknowledged this morning, that there are so many potential sources of infection of cattle, and we do not know much about it, it does seem that that is the answer. But why are we still, it is one of these sorts of things like over the rainbow, we are still ten, 15 years away; we were ten, 15 years away, ten, 15 years ago? Is it that we have not actually put the investment in to move it forward, or are there other problems, and do you consider that, actually, the vaccine is the answer? And, first of all, can we talk about the vaccine in cattle, and then also your views about the possibility of a vaccine for the wildlife?
  (Dr Hewinson) I think what I would say, first, is, there is a vaccine, there is a BCG vaccine, which is safe, which is cheap and has gone into, about a billion doses into people. A couple of problems with the BCG vaccine are that it compromises skin testing, its efficacy is very variable; in all the trials that have been done, the efficacy varies from it does not work at all to 70 per cent efficacy. And the third thing I would say is, it does not protect against pulmonary tuberculosis, it does protect against dissemination of disease, and protects children, for instance, against TB meningitis. I think BCG would be quite an interesting candidate for badgers, because it may lower the instance of shedding. However, in the last 15 years, following the analysis of the efficacy of BCG, there has been a worldwide resurgence in TB vaccination strategies, as drug resistance emerged, primarily in New York, that was the thing that catalysed a lot of human TB vaccine research. And so there has been about ten years, really, of looking for new vaccines; it is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do, there have been many millions of pounds invested in that, in the human field, and there has been very little progress, at the moment. So I would say that there is no guarantee that you will get a vaccine. However, I think now is probably the best time that there has been to do that, because the genome of the TB organism has been sequenced, we are now involved in the project to sequence the bovine TB genome, 94 per cent of that is already done, so we will get clues for better vaccines by comparing the two organisms. The tools for making vaccines have only just emerged in the last couple of years, through the investment in the human field, and we are now starting to get progress in making improved vaccines for TB. I am a member of the Animal Models Task Force for WHO TB vaccine development, and I was at a meeting recently where it now seems that, of 150 vaccines that have been screened, six look as though they are at least as good as BCG, so I think there is light on the horizon. However, even if we were to have a vaccine tomorrow, it would still probably take about ten years to get it into the field, due to all the safety and efficacy testing that you need to do. So I think it is a long-term project, even if you have that vaccine.