A large-scale vaccination program could help eradicate bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in badgers, according to a first-of-its-kind study with “really promising” results for cattle farmers whose herds have been devastated by the disease.
Over four years, researchers vaccinated 265 badgers across 12 farms Cornwall. They found that the percentage of badgers testing positive for bTB dropped from 16% to zero.
“This is the best result you can 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 want to replicate them over a larger area.”
Vaccination could provide an alternative solution to the problem of badgers infecting cattle with bTB – an issue that has caused highly controversial mass culling, with more than 210,000 ties killed since 2013.
Despite more than a decade of badger culling in England, there is no scientific consensus on whether it has reduced bTB, with several studies finding that it has no positive impact.
The badger cull has formed a central pillar of the Conservative government’s efforts to reduce TB in cattle, despite the lack of scientific evidence for the policy. The Labor government said it would end the tie sheddingalthough it is not clear when it will be implemented.
The vaccination project was initiated and partly funded by farmers in Cornwall. It was the first of its kind in that it was led by farmers and involved testing the blood of badgers to determine whether bTB was declining.
Researchers vaccinated badgers over an area of 11 sq km (4.3 sq mi). According to the new studypublished in People and Nature, 74% of badgers in the area received the vaccine.
Woodroffe said: “We’ve shown it can be done, and you can catch enough badgers. Then we looked to see if it was effective, and it was. And then we looked to see if it was acceptable, and the farmers are absolutely delighted, because they can really see a difference.”
It is uncertain whether the trial vaccination reduced TB in cattle in the area, and this is a topic for future research. The main cause of TB in cattle is other cows – scientists estimate it to be approx 94% of infections are transmitted from cow to cowwith less than 6% of badger-transmitted infections to cows.
Bovine TB was devastating for farmers: 20,000 cattle were slaughtered in the 12 months to September 2023.
Keith Truscott, founder of the Mid Cornwall Badger Vaccination Farmers’ Group and a co-author of the report, said: “We need a solution to tackle bovine tuberculosis; as a cattle farmer I live with the constant worry that one of our cows might test positive for the disease, so doing nothing is not an option.
“I sleep better at night knowing there are people out there working to eradicate the disease through vaccination,” he said.
Landowners said they would like to continue the vaccination program beyond the original four years of the study. Farmers were concerned that the vaccine might reach too few badgers and would be too expensive.
However, researchers wrote in the paper: “Our findings show that badger vaccination was practically feasible. The numbers of badgers vaccinated per square kilometer per year were higher than the numbers culled on nearby land, even though vaccination was only done for two nights per location while culling operations spanned at least six weeks.”
Prof James Wood, a veterinary epidemiologist at the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in this study, said: “These results provide very positive, albeit small-scale, findings regarding the feasibility of delivering badger vaccination against bovine TB.”
Dr Graham Smith, a chief scientist at the Animal and Plant Health Agency, part of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who was also not involved in the study, said the research showed the feasibility of vaccination. A reduction in TB in cattle “will be a logical consequence of disease reduction in badgers, where they contribute”, he said.
The project was a collaboration between farmers in Cornwall and researchers from ZSL, Imperial College London and Cornwall Game Confidence. They are now calling on the government to fund more research into community-led badger vaccinations.
