Dr. John Griffin:

Not exactly. If a regional approach is to be used two things must be done. First, you must completely rid the region of TB. Second, you must then stop infection from coming into that region because there is no point in getting rid of infection and then have loads of infection coming back. Those two requirements must be met. To meet the first requirement, we are talking about high-quality testing and so on to get rid of the disease. To prevent it from coming back in, the two main sources of TB for herds must be prevented. These are wildlife and other cattle. As Mr. Cashman has said, there is a good wildlife programme in place for deer or badgers but the main constraint really is other cattle. It is the view of our working group that the main method of transmission of TB in Ireland is transmission between cattle. In our study on the regionalisation we found there was quite a lot of movement of cattle from high-risk herds to low-risk herds. If there is to be a successful eradication programme then we need to deal with that. By high-risk herd I mean a herd that may recently have had an outbreak of tuberculosis and has just gone free. There is loads of evidence to show that those herds can still have some infected animals because the test is not 100%. There can still be some infected animals in those herds.