A large-scale programme in vaccinating badgers could do more to stop the spread of and eventually eradicate bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in badgers, a study has found. This is a first-of-its-kind study with results that are “really promising” for cattle farmers who have seen their herds devastated by the disease.
Over four years, the team vaccinated 265 badgers across 12 farms in Cornwall, finding that the percentage of badgers testing positive for bTB dropped from 16% to zero.
“It’s the best result you could get from a small study,” said the lead researcher, Prof Rosie Woodroffe, from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). “The results are really promising but we’d want to see it replicated over a larger area.”
Vaccinating badgers could offer an alternative solution to the problem of badgers infecting cattle with bTB. This issue has seen extremely controversial mass culls as over 210,000 badgers were killed since 2013. Despite this culling of badgers, there has been no scientific consensus on the impact it has had on the disease. A number of studies found that it had no positive impact.
The vaccination project has been spearheaded and partly funded by Cornish farmer and was the first of its kind, being led by farmers and involving blood testing badgers to assess the impact on the disease. Researchers vaccinated badgers over an area of 11 square km or 4.3 square miles.
The study, published in People and Nature, reported that over 74% of badgers in the region wee vaccinated. “We showed it could be done, and you could catch enough badgers,” Woodroffe said. “Then we looked at if it was effective, and it was. And then we looked at if it was acceptable, and the farmers are absolutely delighted, because they can see a real difference.”
It is not yet certain if the scheme reduced TB in cattle and there will need to be further research. The main cause of TB in cattle is other cows with scientists estimating that 94% of infections pass from cow to cow and fewer than 6% of infections can be blamed on badgers.
Bovine TB has devastated farms with over 20,000 cattle being slaughtered in the 12 months leading up to September 2023.
Image: Caroline Legg
