BOVINE TB
BADGER
A five-year project to vaccinate badgers against bovine TB is up and running in East Sussex. The project’s first badgers were vaccinated at the end of August 2021 in the Cuckmere Valley area – a hotspot for bovine TB in cattle. “Vaccinating the first badgers as part of the VESBA (Vaccinating East Sussex Badgers) project was quite a milestone,” explained Dr Lindsay Heasman, the VESBA Project Manager from Hurst Animal Health. “We held a farmer meeting back in June 2018 to gauge the appetite for such a project, and since then the team at Cliffe Vets has worked hard with local farmers and stakeholders including the NFU to get the project off the ground. Since 2020 we have secured DEFRA funding for the full five years, trained local farmers and obtained the necessary licence from Natural England – all in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. To actually see the first badgers being vaccinated meant such a lot to me.” Bovine TB is a devastating disease that can be transmitted between badgers and cattle. East Sussex is in the Edge (intermediate) TB incidence area of England, and a ‘hotspot’ of TB has been present in the Cuckmere Valley area for many years. TB bacteria have been isolated from badgers, meaning that the local wildlife population is harbouring infection and can re-infect cattle – but badger vaccination offers the opportunity to break this cycle. Whilst badger culls underway in other parts of England, Defra has set out the next phase of the TB strategy, which commits to phasing out culling, replacing it with more government supported vaccination, as well as increased surveillance
VACCINATION
UNDERWAY
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NOVEMBER 2021 | WWW.SOUTHEASTFARMER.NET
and a deployable cattle vaccine. The VESBA project aims to find out the key factors for rolling out badger vaccination on a larger scale. The VESBA project will vaccinate badgers across 250 square kilometres of East Sussex every year for four years – with a target of vaccinating 675 badgers annually. Although badgers can live for up to 14 years, the typical lifespan is three to four, which means that at the end of a four-year vaccination period, the level of TB in the wildlife population should have declined. With farmers adhering to biosecurity measures to reduce cattle-to-cattle and badger-to-cattle contact, as well as making responsible purchasing decisions, the next few years could see
