Badgers were first discovered to carry bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in 1971. Since then much research has been undertaken and badgers are now widely considered to represent a significant wildlife ‘reservoir’ of this disease.

Cattle are by far the most susceptible domestic species to the M.bovis bacteria, although farmed deer, boar, bison, buffalo, goats, llamas and alpacas can also be affected.

How does TB spread?

In hotspot areas of cattle TB, the badger population is considered to play a significant role in maintaining the disease and in preventing its eradication. Although other wild mammals carry the disease, badgers have high rates of infection (the number of animals contracting the disease) and high rates of being infectious (where an infected animal then starts spreading the disease).

The ecology and behaviour of badgers means the potential transmission to cattle is high. For example, badgers often forage in pasture, and can spread the disease by cattle sniffing infected faeces and urine. It is considered that these factors make badgers an important link in the cycle of disease. Other routes of disease transmission include direct contact between badgers and cattle and transmission within farm buildings where cattle are housed or feed is stored.

Once a bovine (e.g. a cow) is infected, however, it does not immediately start spreading the disease. TB develops very slowly and it takes time for lesions to grow in the lungs, and these lesions have to open up before cattle start coughing out the bacteria.

What are the symptoms of TB?

TB is primarily a disease of the respiratory system but very few cases are reported in cattle. This is possibly because the symptoms are very similar to other respiratory diseases but also because regular TB testing of dairy herds catches the infection long before it becomes a chronic disease visually affecting the animal.

As lesions are most common in the lungs (called tubercules) a hard, dry, short cough is usually the first symptom, leading to more frequent coughing and laboured breathing. As this continues cattle will lose condition and later cough up blood.

What is the scale of the TB issue in humans?

The Department of Health still views TB as a ‘major public health problem’ and of the 9.2 million new worldwide cases of TB in 2007 (resulting in 1.7 million deaths!) around 7,750 were in the UK.

In the UK and across the world, more than 99 per cent of new cases in humans are caused by M.tuberculosis and not M.bovis. The risk is still there and so TB is a notifiable disease in all farmed animals. TB in humans presents with the same symptoms whether it is caused by M.tuberculosis and not M.bovis.

How do farmers prevent their cattle being infected by TB?

Farmers are required to undertake regular dairy herd surveillance testing for the disease. If cattle test positive they are sent for compulsory slaughter. In 2010 around 25,000 cattle were slaughtered costing the taxpayer tens of millions of pounds. Once a farm has had TB detected in its herd, movement restrictions are placed on that farm. This means animals cannot be moved off the farm (unless straight to slaughter) until the herd passes two further tests, to ensure TB is no longer detected in the herd.

Farmers can often be surprised at the level of badger activity in and around farm buildings, so they also take practical measures to prevent their animals contracting the disease from badgers. Husbandry measures, such as ensuring gates on cattle sheds and feed stores fit well and are shut at night and raising troughs and salt licks.

The financial implication to farmers.

Regular testing and slaughter of animals is a stressful and costly affair. Although farmers receive money for the animals slaughtered, the amount received does not always accurately reflect the true cost of that animal, for example when high value breeding stock contract the disease.

Government figures state that every time a farmer has a breakdown in the herd it will cost an average of £33,000, although this figure can vary greatly between farms. The compensation paid does not cover any consequential losses, for example the loss in milk sales, or the cost of hiring more labour to help with TB testing.

Is culling badgers the right answer?

A poll conducted by the BBC last year found that about two-thirds of the public oppose culling, with majorities in every age group, region and across both genders.

I’m sure the general perception of badgers is a classically beautiful English animal, but before the question of, ‘do you oppose killing badgers to curb cattle tuberculosis’ with a simple yes or no answer, might it be better to enlightened the general public that it’s ultimately costing the taxpayer about £100m per year and resulting in the death of tens of thousands of cattle?

Your views & thoughts?

Angela Merkel backed attack on the City Tuesday December 13, 2011 by Frederick Forsyth.

Dear Madame Chancellor,

PERMIT me to begin this letter with a brief description of my knowledge of, and affection for, your country.

I first came to Germany as a boy student aged 13 in 1952, two years before you were born. After three extended vacations with German families who spoke no English I found at the age of 16 and to my pleasure that I could pass for German among Germans.

In my 20s I was posted as a foreign correspondent to East Germany in 1963, when you would have been a schoolgirl just north of East Berlin where I lived.

I know Germany, Frau Merkel, from the alleys of Hamburg to the spires of Dresden, from the Rhine to the Oder, from the bleak Baltic coast to the snows of the Bavarian Alps. I say this only to show you that I am neither ignoramus nor enemy.

I also had occasion in those years to visit the many thousands of my countrymen who held the line of the Elbe against 50,000 Soviet main battle tanks and thus kept Germany free to recover, modernise and prosper at no defence cost to herself.

And from inside the Cold War I saw our decades of effort to defeat the Soviet empire and set your East Germany free.

I was therefore disappointed last Friday to see you take the part of a small and vindictive Frenchman in what can only be seen as a targeted attack on the land of my fathers.

We both know that every country has at least one aspect of its society or economy that is so crucial, so vital that it simply cannot be conceded.

For Germany it is surely your automotive sector, your car industry.

Any foreign-sourced measure to target German cars and render them unsaleable would have to be opposed to vetopoint by a German chancellor.

For France it is the agricultural sector. For more than 50 years members of the EU have been taxed under the terms of the Common Agricultural Policy in order to subsidise France’s agriculture. Indeed, the CAP has been the cornerstone of every EU budget since the first day.

Attack it and France fights back.

For us the crucial corner of our economy is the financial services industry. Although parts of it exist all over the country it is
concentrated in that part of London known even internationally as “the City”.

It is not just a few greedy bankers; we both have those but the City is far more. It is indeed a vast banking agglomeration of more banks than anywhere else in the world.

But that is the tip of the iceberg. Also in the City is the world’s greatest concentration of insurance companies.

Add to that the brokers; traders in stocks and shares worldwide, second only, and then maybe not, to Wall Street. But it is not just stocks.

The City is also home to the “exchanges” of gold and precious metals, diamonds, base metals, commodities, futures, derivatives, coffee, cocoa. the list goes on and on.

And it does not yet touch upon shipping, aviation, fuels, energy, textiles. enough. Suffice to say the City is the biggest and busiest marketplace in the world.

It makes the Paris Bourse look like a parish council set against the United Nations and even dwarfs your Frankfurt many times.

That, surely, is the point of what happened in Brussels. The French wish to wreck it and you seem to have agreed. Its contribution to the British economy is not simply useful nor even merely valuable.

It is absolutely crucial. The financial services industry contributes 10 per cent of our Gross Domestic Product and 17.5 per cent of our taxation revenue.

A direct and targeted attack on the City is an attack on my country. But that, although devised in Paris, is what you have chosen to support.

You seem to have decided that Britain is once again Germany’s enemy, a situation that has not existed since 1945.

I deeply regret this but the choice was yours and entirely yours. The Transaction Tax or Tobin Tax you reserve the right to impose would not even generate money for Brussels.

It would simply lead to massive emigration from London to other havens. Long ago it was necessary to live in a city to trade in it.

In the days when deals can flash across the world in a nanosecond all a major brokerage needs is a suite of rooms, computers, telephones and the talent of the young people barking offers and agreements down the phone.

Such a suite of rooms could be in Berne, Thun, Zurich or even Singapore. Under your Tobin Tax tens of thousands would leave London.

This would not help Brussels, it would simply help destroy the British economy.

Your conference did not even save the euro. Permit me a few home truths about it. The euro is a Franco-German construct.

It was a German chancellor (Kohl) who ordered a German banker (Karl Otto Pohl) to get together with a French civil servant (Delors) on the orders of a French president (Mitterrand) and create a common currency.

Which they did. IT was a flawed construct. Like a ship with a twisted hull it might float in calm water but if it ever hit a force eight it would probably founder.

Even then it might have worked for it was launched with a manual of rules, the Growth And Stability Pact. If the terms of that book of rules had been complied with the Good Ship Euro might have survived.

But compliance was entrusted to the European Central Bank which catastrophically failed to insist on that compliance.

Rules governing the growing of cucumbers are more zealously enforced. This was a European Bank in a German city under a French president and it failed in its primary, even its sole, duty.

This had everything to do with France and Germany and nothing whatever to do with Britain.

Yet in Brussels last week the EU pack seemed intent only on venting its spleen on the country that wisely refused to abolish its pound.

You did not even address yourselves to saving the euro but only to seeking a way to ensure it might work in some future time.

But the euro will not be saved. It is crumbling now. And since you have now turned against my country, from this side of the Channel, Madame Chancellor, one can only say of the euro:

YOU MADE IT, YOU MEND IT.