Dr. Margaret Good:

None of these is a question we have not asked ourselves. It will be challenging to meet the 2030 target of being officially TB free. This does not mean biological extinction of the organism. The TB control programme is governed by a number of directives, one of which is the trading directive. This governs the trading in cattle throughout Europe. It uses the term "officially free", which is not complete biological extinction but very low levels. The first stage will be to get to these very low levels. It will take us longer to get biological extinction whereby we do not have it in any wildlife or cattle. We set ourselves challenging targets previously in conjunction with the farming community, and the 2030 target is achievable.

I will deal with the questions on contiguous herds before those on wildlife. TB tends to be an area problem because it is contagious, so when we detect a herd that is infected and there has been a spread of TB locally in the herd we look at the neighbourhood. We visit the farm to try to figure out where the infection might have been focused.

If somebody had an outfarm and a farm and it was focused on the outfarm we would concentrate on the neighbours around the outfarm who will be notified and put on a programme of testing. Any neighbours in that situation who have not tested in the four months will be restricted until they have passed a test. That is because there were too many instances of neighbours bringing out their cattle to sell once there was a breakdown in the neighbourhood. The disease was then passed on and caused problems in other herds. Not everybody would do that but it was a problem so the rule is that if they have not tested in the previous four months the herd will be restricted until it has tested clear. Once it is clear it can trade again. Until we have the problem in the area sorted we keep doing that. That is a new control introduced in the past year. It is an area of tightening to help us reach the 2030 target.

The skin test is the screening test because it is the most specific test. When reactors are disclosed on that test we aim to do a 24 hour blood test, the blood arrives in the laboratory the following day. We do not expect 100% agreement between the two tests but we do expect approximately 80% at least and in practice we get higher than that. If we get no or very low agreement we go back to see why not. Our first step is to do the eight hour blood test in case there was a mistake in the laboratory or the cells had died on the way to the laboratory and it was less efficient. The cells have to be live. They normally agree but there is always the possibility that they would not. Then we would investigate further why the animals do not seem to be infected.

I was asked were two laboratories sufficient. We have three. One completes the test and does the initial stages. That is based in Dublin and takes the samples from that catchment area. Another is in Sligo and takes the samples from that catchment area. The one in Cork takes the samples from that catchment area. They do the initial incubation stages and the final test and reading is done in Dublin. That is enough. This year we will test approximately 40,000 blood samples which is much fewer than the 8 million skin tests because we do it only in the infected herds and the infected groups of animals.

We would like to have reactors removed as fast as possible from the restricted herds but farmers want to have them valued by a valuer of their choice on the panel, which takes time. That process has imposed some delays. Animals cannot be valued instantaneously. Meanwhile, we will do the blood tests. Sometimes the two processes can overlap, especially if we are in an area where we know we have problems and it is not a herd out of the blue. I do not know that there is much more we can do to speed up the removal and have the animals individually valued and allow the farmer the opportunity to have an appeal and perhaps a second valuation if he is not happy with the first one. That takes time. The valuers are independent while they are on a panel which is approved by the Department.

In response to the question about wildlife, we detected our first infected badger in the 1970s and it took quite a long time before people accepted that they might be part of the problem. Then there was the question of what to do about them. We did various projects and in the early 2000s we agreed a plan with the National Parks and Wildlife Service, under the Department of Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, which is responsible for wildlife. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine is not responsible for wildlife and badgers are protected. Under that agreement where an epidemiological investigation implicates badgers in a TB breakdown we can remove them. We are limited to removing them from 30% of the country but we have reduced the density of badgers in those years. In those years we have not examined every single badger but we examine approximately one third of the badgers we capture. We did several projects which found that there is TB in badgers throughout Ireland. Where there is TB in cattle the TB in badgers is worse, where there is no TB in cattle the badgers have much lower levels of TB. We concentrate on hotspots and remove badgers from those. We have reduced the level of infection in the badgers by more than 50%. They are now coming more into line with the level in the areas where we did not have problems in cattle. It would seem there is a threshold and when it spills over that poses a greater challenge to the cattle. We will continue to do that.

We have also done quite a lot of work on developing a vaccine with the British and the French have recently joined that group. We ran an oral vaccine project in Kilkenny. It finished recently and the work has been analysed. We expect a report any day on its outcome.

We have a project to catch and vaccinate badgers which is very labour intensive. This is in areas where previously we culled badgers. We are watching to see if we can keep the disease levels at bay and allow a vaccinated population to start to rebuild. We will probably have to do some culling as well. For the long term we are trying to develop a system to deliver vaccine to badgers orally.

In that way, we can get better coverage for the whole country and a better delivery of vaccine to individual badgers. I do not think we could catch enough of them to vaccinate and doing this would be hugely resource-dependent. In our project this year, we have been delivering bait containing biomarkers which leave a residue in the badger. We are using it in the areas where we are capturing badgers to learn how many of them are eating the bait and how long we have to put out the bait before they eat it. This is obviously a novel food for them. A number of ecology studies are ongoing with a view to delivering the vaccine to the badger population. There is no way we would want to wipe out badgers throughout the country.

I expect that the bait project will finish early next year. We will then analyse the results and we will have a better idea of whether we can get wild badgers to eat the vaccine for us. In an ideal world, 80% would eat it and would be vaccinated. When we started this project, nobody knew anything about the immune system of badgers or whether they could mount an immune response to TB. Thankfully, they can and vaccination in a laboratory setting works. I hope we will hear about the vaccine in the field setting shortly. Hopefully, that will work too and both the oral delivery and dummy bait projects will be ready for the next stage. We will have some work to do to get it licensed because getting vaccines licensed under EU medicines regulations is quite complicated, especially when it is a product one is going to be putting into the environment.

The next question was on deer, specifically in Wicklow. I used to work in west Wicklow so I know the area quite well. We removed quite a lot of badgers from west Wicklow earlier this year and that will hopefully help the situation. The area where deer were specifically looked at is a very discrete area of east Wicklow, in the northern part around Calary. There had been very high TB levels in cattle. Having previously looked at cattle, deer and badgers, we found that they shared the same strains of TB. I understand that, with the collaboration of the National Parks and Wildlife Service, there will be a cull of deer in that area over the course of this season and into next year. Hopefully that will reduce the number of deer in the area. In the meantime, we will look at the rest of Wicklow to see if there are any other hot spots but that project has not yet commenced. It will have to be done in conjunction with the National Parks and Wildlife Service because they are the people who are responsible for deer.

Wicklow is unique in that it gets deer samples from hunters. I do not know a lot of the specifics on this because it is not my area, but there is an EU regulation for wild game and which deals with the examinations that have to be done when hunting is for human consumption. The Food Safety Authority has been involved in training hunters to check carcasses and they are required to send us samples if they detect anything that looks similar to TB. We also get farmers to send us samples following hunts and Wicklow is the only county in Ireland where, every year, we have had positive samples. In the past 20 years, every county will have had at least one deer with TB but nowhere near the same number as in Wicklow. I would be very surprised if there were lots of pockets of deer with TB which we had not identified or of which there were no records. As forestry increases, the habitats where deer can hide out during the day have increased and they are very visible on fields grazing but they are not protected and can be killed, so we are more than willing to check out the samples we get. Wildlife control and population management is not the job of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine.

I was also asked if it is possible to carry out two tests on the same day. We screened herds with the skin test because it is the most specific test. When reactors are found on that test, we go back in and do the blood test. The first blood sampling cannot be done with that test but where disease persists in a herd we repeat the blood tests with the reactor retests and in these cases it is done on the same day. I was also asked what additional steps were needed to get out by 2030. That is a challenge. If we knew the answer, we would already be doing it. Vaccinating badgers is one step and we will probably have to control movement, even more so in infected herds because we have done a number of risk analysis studies and seen that herds which have had a history of TB outbreaks have a tendency towards recrudescence and repeat breakdown. In some cases, stock has been sold before the repeat breakdown so we allow a short movement window after we derestrict the herd for stock. The risk studies suggest they are safe enough for the first 60-90 days but, as time progresses, they get more and more risky. This year, where there is a high risk of breakdown we allow a three-month movement window after we derestrict the herd and the herd must be tested again some time in the next five months. Once the three months have elapsed, farmers can sell to slaughter and they can also sell calves under six weeks of age. They cannot sell anything else until after another herd test has been carried out.

The farmers involved can choose the most suitable time for themselves within the following five months to do the test. That limits the potential for spread from those. We will need to do things like that to limit potential spread. Probably in some of the areas where TB tends to focus, instead of one annual test we might bring in two, but we have not made any decisions on anything else yet.

We work a lot with the Centre for Veterinary Epidemiology and Risk Analysis in UCD. It does much of the analysis of data, looking for the risks of various aspects. When we have the risks identified, we try to figure out how we can mitigate those risks and prevent them causing problems. If members have any ideas on what additional steps might help, they should feel free to present them and we will examine them.

The other question was on producing cattle for slaughter. I mentioned a number of directives that govern TB eradication and trade. One of those requires that when TB is detected, the herd must be restricted and no buy-in is allowed until the herd has had a clear test. We had many more herds restricted because of detections at slaughter from fattening herds. At one stage we had-----