Professor Simon More:

I assure the Chairman that I will summarise the statement that I have provided.

I am the director of the UCD centre for veterinary epidemiology and risk analysis. Our work is entirely to provide the science to support policy decision-making both by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and Animal Health Ireland in the area of animal health and welfare, as well as public health. The centre is fully funded by the Department and is located in the veterinary school at University College Dublin. I also chair the scientific committee of the European Food Safety Authority, where we do similar work in providing the science to support policy decision-making by the Commission.

I will glean key components from my presentation. The programme is very much informed by ongoing research. Our focus has been on two questions as to what the constraints to eradication are and what the practical solutions are to address those constraints. We focus on the three areas of cattle, wildlife and the overall programme, including seeking to glean lessons from international experience.

On page 3 of the statement provided, there is a graph that compares the situation in Ireland with the four countries of the UK. The green line shows there has been an ongoing fall in the incidence of TB in this country over time but certainly not to the point of eradication.

On page 4, one can see the fundamental question that I want to address today, which is whether we are doing enough to successfully eradicate TB from Ireland by 2030. I am sure members will remember that 2030 is the target year that was set by the Department.

Prior to the recent introduction of badger vaccination, it is my view, which is one that is widely shared, that we did not have the tools to eradicate TB. It was very much a control programme that focused on how we could ensure TB remains at low levels while identifying and addressing the constraints to eradication. Essentially, we did not have a full toolbox of what was required.

Badger vaccination is now in place and with ongoing roll-out, it certainly is an important addition. It is my view, however, and there is very robust evidence to support this, that even with all current strategies plus the new badger vaccination programme, it will not be sufficient for us to achieve the eradication of TB by 2030. There are three reasons for me to make this statement. First, ongoing national research has identified a number of issues that are of ongoing concern. Some of these are technical and some are not. The non-technical ones include programme fatigue, the commercial realities of trying to keep commerce going while we seek to eradicate, as well as limited industry engagement.

The second piece of evidence comes from international experience. Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the UK have had long-term TB eradication programmes, mainly in the presence of wildlife. Other countries have had problems but these four countries have really serious problems and two of them have made substantial progress. The last known case of TB to exist in Australia was in 2002 and that was in buffalo, and before that TB was found in cattle in 2000. New Zealand is also making very substantial progress and I am more than happy to talk about that in greater detail. Lessons learned from those two countries suggest that there are fundamental differences between key components of the programme here versus those countries that were successful and they particularly relate to cattle controls and industry engagement.

The third piece of evidence comes from work that has recently finished. We have been working closely with Wageningen University in the Netherlands. That work was undertaken to assess and answer the question of whether we can eradicate given current controls plus badger vaccination. Central to this work is a concept with which members may not be familiar but which is important in terms of the argument that I want to put forward. I refer to the concept of the reproduction ratio. In terms of the way that diseases work, the reproduction ratio is the number of secondary cases for every primary, which means there is a threshold. In other words, if we can get the reproduction ratio or "R" to be less than 1 then we can move towards eradication but if "R" is more than 1 then we cannot do so. Therefore, for the threshold "R" must equal 1. The work that is being done, as part of that study, looks solely at current controls without badger vaccination and it would suggest that as "R" sits between 1.07 and 1.16, essentially we are not eradicating. When we add badger vaccination, we tip below the threshold but only just. The estimate that we have got is "R" equals 0.93 to 0.97 or just below the threshold for eradication, and that is all current controls plus badger vaccination.

If we continued with the current controls plus badger vaccination, the fact that "R" is just below 1 means we are looking at an eradication time of between 60 and 90 years. A couple of things suggest that the figure of just below 1 is a little bit optimistic. First, it is based on national averages and we know that some parts of the country will be higher than others, which would mean we would not eradicate it in some parts while it would be easier in others. As we shift from culling to vaccination we will, by default, end up with more badgers and a higher density of badgers makes it more challenging for a vaccine to work.

We are at a critical decision point, which was not the case one year ago, five years ago or ten years ago on account of the fact that badger vaccination was not on the table. If we are genuinely interested in eradicating TB very quickly, say by 2030, we need to think hard about the scope and intensity of control measures. This is important in terms of both time and the cumulative costs.

On page 8 of my presentation, figure 2 relates to a different programme, the programme for bovine viral diarrhoea, BVD, but the message is the same. It shows the number of persistently infected, PI, animals at different points in time. In 2013 the BVD eradication programme started and if there had been no PI retention at all, we would have followed the green line and we would have had no BVD in the country now. However, we followed the yellow line between 2013 and 2016 and, as members will see, it never gets to zero. If that had continued, we would never have eradicated the disease. We are mirroring the purple line. There were issues of PR retention between 2013 and 2016 but it has progressively been addressed, though there were an extra three or four years of costs in the process of eradication.

I want to focus on the additional measures we should consider. I am re-presenting the science from research done by our group and by many other groups and it is my view that there are three fundamental areas on which we need to focus. One is to adequately address TB risk from wildlife and the badger vaccination programme is fundamental to this. Most of the work involved in this is monitoring as we need to ensure it works. If it does not work, we need to know why. These are all active areas of research.

I am aware that deer are an important concern for this committee. It is important to understand the epidemiological role of deer. They get infected but we need to know if they get infected as a spillover host from infected cattle and badgers or if they are a maintenance host, where the disease self-sustains in deer populations. Most worrying, we need to know if they are a maintenance host with a spill back to cattle, like badgers. I have given examples from various programmes. In some countries, deer act as a maintenance host, such as Spain. The most interesting example, however, comes from Michigan, where white-tailed deer are a maintenance host for TB, although it was a man-made problem. They acted as a spillover host, picking up the infection from cattle, but hunters in that state were leaving large dumps of silage and hay over winter to keep the deer numbers up to facilitate hunting in the spring. This artificially increased the numbers and encouraged aggregation, which is why deer are now more than a spillover host in Michigan.

Data are sparse in Ireland. The epidemiological role played by wild deer, particularly sika and sika crosses, is uncertain but we have some evidence. The first piece of evidence is the expansion of the area, though we do not know about density and I understand work is currently being done on that. In most parts of the country the percentage of infected deer is actually very low, though the numbers are much higher in Wicklow. My assessment, which is shared by all the scientists with whom I work, is that in most parts of Ireland there is no evidence to support the view that deer are a maintenance host. In Wicklow it is different and in the hotspots in that county we do not know whether they are a maintenance host. Higher TB prevalence has been observed but this does not provide conclusive evidence that TB is self-sustaining in local deer populations, nor of the relative contribution compared to cattle and badgers, if it is self-sustaining.

My paper presents my thoughts on this matter. I have spoken about this in great detail with a colleague in Michigan and with colleagues here. There are possibilities but it is not easy. In Michigan the methodologies are not directly translatable. In areas of concern such as Wicklow, it is important that deer are managed so that they do not end up as a maintenance host. Density and aggregation are things to look at in this context. When deer are removed, it is important that their scientific value is maximised so that we can understand their role in this.

A new methodology has come on the scene in the past few years, known as whole genome sequencing, which seeks to understand what the genome is. There is now an opportunity for us to understand the direction of spread. Cattle and deer are infected but is it that cattle infect deer or the other way around? Whole genome sequencing offers us that opportunity and that work is just starting here in the Republic.

The second important area is additional risk-based cattle controls, which the committee discussed in December. In countries such as Ireland, it is not possible with the current technology to guarantee its herd is free. A risk-based approach is used internationally so we identify a herd as low-risk or high risk. Herds can be at risk for up to ten years but it depends on the risk factors that are involved.

There are two main drivers for this persistent risk, one is infection in the locality and the second is infection in the herd. I wish to focus on the latter in particular, which is due to residual infection that is present in animals but not detected using current tests. There are several studies showing that this is a significant problem. Work that we have done, and work from Cambridge, based on modelling studies, would suggest that between 10% and 25% of herds at release still have infected animals present. That was based on Great Britain, GB, data.

We have not done similar work here but what we have done has shown that herds definitely are at increasing risk for an extended period. We have been able to disentangle, not completely but to some extent, that residual infection is a very important part of that. We have done work recently to create a picture of the level of movement of cattle in Ireland as part of ongoing commerce. The data are instructive, indicating for example, that there were 1.3 million movements, or movement events in 2016. This refers to trailers, not animals, a trailer could have one animal, ten or 100, and the distance travelled by those vehicles was enormous but that is beside the point. There is ongoing "churn" or recycling of infection where we are not clearing all infection from herds at the point of derestriction. We have substantial movement of cattle. There are two issues connected with the fact that herds are being released and there are still infected cattle, one technical and one legislative. Technically, we do not have the tools that will provide us with 100% guarantees of freedom. Human doctors do not either. Second, as the committee is aware, under the relevant legislation in the EU, Council Directive No. 64/432, as soon as herds have had two clear tests they are free to trade. That is not sufficient to mitigate risk. By comparison with my home country, Australia, for herds to move from point of derestriction after infection takes eight years. Here it takes four months. That is a huge difference. How do we reconcile that with ongoing commerce? The only methodology available internationally to cope with the problem of residual infection and ongoing movement on the one hand, and on the other, ongoing commerce, which has to keep going, is the concept of a risk-based approach. That is that herds move progressively from high risk to low risk with the opportunity over time for us to gain increasing confidence that they are free and that happens while there is ongoing testing. The problem is that while we are doing that, we have to be careful not to put other herds at risk. The approach that has been proposed and which I have spoken about for years, and I appreciate it was discussed in December, is the concept of the high-risk herds being treated very intensely to reduce risk and the concept of risk-based trading. That is a process of allowing trade as much as possible while minimising the potential for high-risk herds to transfer infection to low. That approach was the centrepiece of the Australian programme. That is important because the whole country was under risk-based trading. In New Zealand it is also a key component but there are very few infected herds there. The process is that farmers of a particular risk sell cattle to herds of equivalent or higher risk and source from herds of equivalent or lower risk.

It is fair to say in summary that TB is widely considered a Government problem in Ireland. That is in fundamental contrast to international examples of success. The UK struggles with very similar problems as ours but the problem is a lot worse there. Australia and New Zealand, however, are the only other two countries in a similar situation and they have been very successful. The story there of industry engagement was fundamentally different. Industry representatives and government have been very involved in genuine and regular, open and honest engagement and building a trusting environment where real issues can be addressed together. In New Zealand, I note the programme is run by a non-government organisation. As part of that industry engagement, which involves joint decision-making, cost-sharing has been a key component. In my submission I highlight several models of cost-sharing that have been used and I highlight the TB stakeholder forum, a very important initiative here, seeking in part to make a bridge to genuine industry engagement. I also highlight Animal Health Ireland, which seeks to do that in an Irish context.