Dr. June Fanning:

As I have said, the issue is the fact that it is a more complex disease and it involves a wildlife element. In 1974, TB was detected in badgers and while their role at that stage was not fully understood, there has been a lot of research since. Badgers have been shown to be important as maintenance hosts and also in the transmission badger to badger, and also badger to cattle. We now have a badger TB programme as well. In 2019 there was a large scale roll-out of the vaccine in badgers. We have gone from fewer than 2,000 badgers vaccinated to over 7,000 last year and we are about 1,000 ahead of where we were this time last year with badger vaccination. Where TB breakdowns have been associated with wildlife, we obviously have to address that as well and that complicates things. The brucellosis situation was different because there was not a wildlife species involved as well.