A large-scale vaccination programme could help eradicate bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in badgers, according to a first-of-its-kind study with “really promising” results for cattle farmers, whose herds have been devastated by the disease.
Over four years, researchers vaccinated 265 badgers across 12 farms in Cornwall. They found the percentage of badgers testing positive for bTB fell from 16% to zero.
“It’s the best result you could get from a small study,” said the lead researcher, Prof Rosie Woodroffe, from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). “The results are really promising but we’d want to see it replicated over a larger area.”
Vaccination could provide an alternative solution to the problem of badgers infecting cattle with bTB – an issue that has prompted highly controversial mass culls, with more than 210,000 badgers killed since 2013.
Despite more than a decade of culling badgers in England, there is no scientific consensus on whether it has reduced bTB, with several studies finding it had no positive impact.
The badger cull formed a central pillar of the Conservative government’s efforts to reduce TB in cattle, despite the lack of scientific evidence for the policy. The Labour government said it would end the badger cull, although it is not clear when that will be enacted.
The vaccination project was initiated and partly funded by farmers in Cornwall. It was the first of its kind in that it was led by farmers and involved testing the blood of badgers to assess whether bTB was declining.
Researchers vaccinated badgers over an area of 11 sq km (4.3 sq miles). According to the new study, published in People and Nature, 74% of badgers in the area received the vaccine.
Woodroffe said: “We showed it could be done, and you could catch enough badgers. Then we looked at if it was effective, and it was. And then we looked at if it was acceptable, and the farmers are absolutely delighted, because they can see a real difference.”
It is uncertain if the pilot vaccination reduced TB in cattle in the area, and this is a subject for future research. The main cause of TB in cattle is other cows – scientists estimate that about 94% of infections are passed from cow to cow, with less than 6% of infections transmitted to cows by badgers.
Bovine TB has been devastating for farmers: 20,000 cattle were slaughtered in the 12 months to September 2023.
Keith Truscott, founder of the Mid Cornwall Badger Vaccination Farmers’ Group and a co-author of the report, said: “We need a solution to tackle bovine tuberculosis; as a cattle farmer, I’m living with the constant worry that one of our cows might test positive for the disease, so doing nothing is not an option.
“I sleep better at night knowing that there are people out there working to eradicate the disease through vaccination,” he said.
Landowners said they would like to continue the vaccination programme beyond the original four years of the study. Farmers had been concerned that the vaccine might reach too few badgers and be too expensive.
However, researchers wrote in the paper: “Our findings show that badger vaccination was practically achievable. The numbers of badgers vaccinated per square kilometre a year were higher than the numbers culled on nearby land, even though vaccination was conducted for only two nights per location while culling operations extended over at least six weeks.”
Prof James Wood, a veterinary epidemiologist at Cambridge University, who was not involved in this study, said: “These results provide very positive, albeit small-scale, findings in relation to the practicability of delivering badger vaccination against bovine TB.”
Dr Graham Smith, a lead scientist at the Animal and Plant Health Agency, part of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who was also not involved in the study, said the research demonstrated the feasibility of vaccination. A reduction in TB in cattle “would be a logical consequence of disease reduction in badgers, where they are contributing”, he said.
The project was a collaboration between farmers in Cornwall and researchers from ZSL, Imperial College London and Cornwall Wildlife Trust. They are now calling on the government to fund more research on community-led badger vaccinations.
