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Has state-sponsored badger-culling caused very widespread increases in Tb in cattle in GB and Ireland? 

I have read that, during a certain ten-year period - and one in large measure overlapping, I believe, the ISG's ten-triplicate, badger-culling trial - the incidence of bovine tuberculosis in Great Britain increased seven-fold. 

I have also read that, following the "getting underway" of nation-wide badger-culling in the Republic of Ireland in "1997-98," a 54% increase in the number of tuberculin-reactors slaughtered in Ireland was recorded in 1998 as compared with the 1997 figure, which had been not much different from the figures recorded annually from 1993. This increased level was sustained in 1999, according to my source, the offical figures given me by DAFF, the Irish department of agriculture, when the increase was approximately 55% above the 1997 level. After that, there was some apparent tailing off, but there has meanwhile also been a steady decline in the Irish national herd since about then, too, so that the absolute decline in reactor numbers may conceal a real increase of some 15-20% in the incidence of reactors from 1997 to 2006, for instance, in marked contrast to the impression given here, http://www.agriculture.gov.ie/press/pressreleases/2007/may/title,13476,en.html , and especially in the opening sentence of the sixth paragraph of that press release of May 2007. 

To my knowledge, no figures have yet been published indicating the numbers of reactors found in the buffer zones of the Irish Four Areas Project, carried out between 1 Sept. 1997 and 31st August 2002, a fact I have long found disturbing. If anybody knows any such figures, whether published or not, could they please enter a source for them here? 

I have many reasons to suspect a causal link in both cases, the GB and the Irish, that much of the bovine tuberculosis increases followed as a direct result of the culling operations, the effects of which have been far more widespread than officially/publicly explored, investigated, suspected or acknowledged. 

I would be very keen to read others' opinions on this matter, please. 

Tom Kelly, MVB, MRCVS, "Inatosha," 965, Luna Vista Drive, Escondido, California 92025, USA. tomkellyvet@gmail.com ph:+7602917066