Dr. Margaret Good:

It is down to 750 now, so we have reduced it considerably. We hope the blood testing we are doing in the infected herds will reduce that even further and that it will pick up animals. While we still had the blood tests under trial, we had animals that had been positive but were not surrendered and we watched them progress. They were up to ten times more likely to become reactor within 18 months or turn up with lesions when slaughtered compared with their herd mates that had been negative to the test. By taking out those animals we hope we are also contributing to the reduction in the number of animals that we will kill out with TB when they are slaughtered.

For many years 20% of those herds would have a really bad TB outbreak when we detected them at slaughter. It then reduced to only 16% and at the latest count it has dropped another couple of percentage points below 16%. So that seems to be working. I know it is no consolation to the beef-fattening farmers, but fewer of them are in trouble than was the case. If they do a test that is clear, they can be given permission to buy in. We have a small number of herds where very reluctantly the EU officials agreed to something we called "feedlots". Initially they thought they would be like fedlots that were in America and the rest of Europe, that the cattle would be housed all the time. They were appalled that the cattle would be out on grass. We have assured them that these are not breeding herds, etc. They are operating a very tight thing. Every year they ask us questions about them. They do not like that we allow this exception and it is against EU rules.