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Bovine Tuberculosis: Disease Control

Answer

The following table shows the number of cattle slaughtered under bovine tuberculosis (TB) control measures in Great Britain over the last five years, and the number of these animals with demonstrable post-mortem evidence of infection having tested positive for bovine TB in each of the last five years.

	Number of cattle slaughtered¹	Number of "confirmed" cases	Number of "unconfirmed" cases²
2008³	39,973	13,283	26,690
2007³	28,200	9,145	19,055
2006³	22,282	7,697	14,585
2005³	30,093	8,715	21,378
2004³	19,938	6,355	13,583
¹ Includes cattle slaughtered as skin and gamma-interferon test reactors, skin test inconclusive reactors and direct contacts.
² Number of cattle slaughtered—number of confirmed cases
³ 2004-08 figures are provisional, subject to change as more data become available.
Source:
Data are sourced from DEFRA's VetNet Animal Health database, downloaded in December 2009.

Following a TB breakdown we aim to carry out post-mortem inspections of all the slaughtered cattle and to take tissue samples from the reactor (or if several animals must be removed, from a representative subset of those), to attempt isolation and molecular typing of the causative organism in the laboratory. This is done to support epidemiological investigations and management of the incident, rather than to validate the ante-mortem test results.Failure to detect lesions of TB by post-mortem examination, or to culture M. bovis in the laboratory, does not imply that a test reactor was not infected with bovine TB. Indeed, in the early stages of this disease it is not always possible to observe lesions during abattoir post-mortem examination and, due to the fastidious nature of this organism, it is very difficult to isolate it from tissue samples without visible lesions. Meaningful proportions that subsequently did not confirm disease at culture for TB test reactors cannot be provided, as substantial numbers of skin and gIFN positive animals are not subject to laboratory culture—e.g. once infection has already been identified in other cattle from the same herd.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

502 c8-9W; 303534

Session

2009-10

Subjects

Disease control Bovine tuberculosis

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk