Bluetongue Virus - To Jab or not to Jab…. That is the question.

Something rather bizarre’s been happening over the past few days. The sun has emerged, and for a blissful weekend it actually shone upon the righteous. That is the annual Langdon Beck Sheep show, which not only managed to take place this year, but it was also bathed in warm sunshine.

This is a traditional show in the finest traditions of the Northern Hills. Two hundred sheep and a `Bouncy Castle’. What more do you need? These are uncertain times though. Disease is never far away, and this year’s `plague de jour’ is Bluetongue. Unlike the foot and mouth virus, which knocked last year’s show on the head, Bluetongue is primarily tackled using vaccination.

Langdon Beck Show

At least that’s what the veterinary authorities would like to happen. Farmers have other ideas though, and many of those I spoke to at Langdon Beck had only vaccinated the stock which would be sold at this autumn’s sales. Of course there’s little point in vaccinating the fat lambs which will be going to the slaughterhouse in the next few weeks, they’d be dead – at the hands of the slaughterman - by the time the vaccine could take effect. There is according to vets a case for vaccinating the breeding stock which is staying on the hills.

Many farmers argue that at this time of year it’s impossible to gather in all the animals from the fells because there’s too many, and anyway the weather’s starting to get colder. Remember this is `Nine months of winter and three months of bad weather’ country. A lot of the farms take the view that the `vector-free’ period when the midges which carry the virus stop flying – and even die off, will be here quite soon.

The vets aren’t so sure and told me that a `Indian Summer’ could carry quite a risk of the disease re-emerging. There’s also a rumour circulating amongst the farmers that the vaccine can cause fertility problems amongst the ewes. Vets dismiss this saying the vaccine’s dead not live so there shouldn’t be any issues with it. Also there’s the cost. At fifty pence a dose, that can add up to more than a hundred pounds for even a small upland farm. But as one of the local vets told me that’s peanuts compared with the cost of treating even a couple of sheep which get the disease.

Just when you think it's safe to go back in the cowshed...

You might recall that last year the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse decided to spend their summer holiday in the UK. After all there are a wide range of places offering stabling facilities... War and Conquest were taking a breather from some heavy-duty rampaging in the Middle East, Death was having a sulk, so, finding himself at a loose end, Pestilence decided to occupy those long summer days by generating a bit of misery across the land.

After a spot of ad hoc flooding, he turned his attention to spreading a bit of disease, and where better than the stockbroker belt of Surrey. Some impromptu re-plumbing on the drains of the Pirbright laboratory site shared by Merial, a veterinary pharmaceutical company and the Institute of Animal Health, the IAH, did the trick. An outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease led to eight farms being infected and just over two thousand animals slaughtered. It caused a summer of chaos for farmers, but why stop there.

On the other side of the channel rancid fetid midges, carrying a ghastly virus called Bluetongue were waiting to pounce. Actually the midges can't have been that rancid... they were well enough to fly across more than forty miles of water and pass the disease on to a Highland cow called Debbie on a rare-breeds farm in Suffolk.

The Culicoides midge which carries and transmits the Bluetongue Virus - picture courtesy Institute for Animal Health

Now to add to the misery of the foot and mouth restrictions which effectively brought a halt to livestock marts and agricultural shows a new set of restrictions were imposed because of Bluetongue.

I remember the day that Bluetongue was discovered was the day that the Langdon Beck show should have been happening. Langdon Beck is at the very top end of Teesdale in the North Pennines. It's a wonderful old fashioned sheep show, with just one trade stand from the local agricultural supplies company, and a bouncy castle. And lots of Swaledale Sheep.

The show had already been cancelled because of Foot and Mouth movement restrictions, and the chairman had organised a `cow day'. A `cow day' is a Dales euphemism for a massive drinking session. As I was about to join the farmers drowning their sorrows at the loss of their show, a text message from the DEFRA press office announced the arrival of Bluetongue, not unexpected but still shocking. I didn't have the heart to tell the farmers who had just lost their annual show.

Almost a year later the livestock industry is still reeling from the effects of Bluetongue. The virus causes symptoms similar to Foot and Mouth disease, but the one crucial difference is that it cannot be spread from animal to animal. Instead it is carried by a midge, the Culicoides, which sucks blood from an infected animal, and then infects other uninfected livestock as it moves around gorging itself. It affects all the animals which are susceptible to Foot and Mouth except pigs, which don't get it or carry it.

A sheep with Bluetongue - picture courtesy Institute for Animal Health

Although animals can't pass the infection directly to each other, those which have the virus are still a potential meal for a hungry midge. Because of that a series of movement restrictions were introduced, which aimed to limit the accessibility of these animals to midges. Within one hundred kilometres of an infection a Protection Zone is declared, beyond that a further fifty km is declared a surveillance zone.

Generally speaking in a Protection Zone animals can only move directly to slaughter, and are otherwise banned from leaving the area. In a Surveillance Zone animals can move freely within the zone, or from it to the Protection Zone but not to the disease free area outside. This has meant massive disruption for livestock markets, for agricultural shows and for owners of high value breeding animals who want to be able to trade them to the highest bidder.

Unlike Foot and Mouth disease, part of the control strategy for Bluetongue is widespread preventative vaccination. A vaccine against the serotype of the disease in the UK... BTV 8 has been developed and is being rolled out across the country. Farmers are paying about fifty pence per animal for the dose which they administer themselves. Animal health experts don't yet know how effective it is, but both they and the farming industry are keeping their fingers crossed.

Now however there is another threat lurking. In all there are twenty-four different varieties, or serotypes of the Bluetongue virus. The disease in the UK is serotype 8 BTV 8. What is worrying the scientists now is Serotype 1, BTV 1. It came to Europe last year from North Africa, landing in Gibraltar and killing four sheep. It then spread up the Iberian Peninsular before reaching the border with France last Autumn. Midge activity falls off when the temperature drops so it didn't get any further. Until now. Recently BTV 1 has started appearing in South West France, and is moving northwards at the rate of twenty kilometres every week.

What is particularly worrying is that the area affected by BTV 8, the one which is `over here', now overlaps with the BTV 1 area in Southern France. We're not talking mutation, but as Professor Peter Mertens from the Institute of Animal Health told me, the two varieties could end up `having sex' and swapping some of their characteristics... making the disease harder to tackle. The good news is that there is also a vaccine for the BTV 1 version of Bluetongue, as with BTV 8, however neither is effective against the other serotype. That means that if BTV 1 reaches the UK the whole vaccination process will be have to be carried out again.

The one ray of hope though is that it is unlikely that BTV 1 will get beyond Northern France this year which gives vets and the pharmaceutical companies a breathing space to manufacture more of the BTV 1 vaccine to cope with another invasion, should it happen.

The badger lives...for the moment?

It’s unusual to have a minister, who tells it the way it is, but Lord (Call me Jeff) Rooker invariably has something interesting to say…even if you can see the fixed smiles on the faces of his civil servants begin to sag slightly as their minister wanders dangerously off the path of righteousness and says something interesting into a microphone. More about Lord Rooker later but first my own failings.

I gave up biology at the age of thirteen, having to ditch it in favour of physics and chemistry, and history at what was then…in a more innocent age, called `O-levels’.

Sadly the glamorous world of animal science lost a razor sharp mind to the rather humdrum life of a radio journalist.

As a consequence I haven’t a clue whether it is badgers which cause the spread of Bovine TB amongst cattle, or whether cattle spread it to each other with badgers as collateral damage.

For farmers with cattle though the indisputable fact is that their animals are dying because of the disease… or more accurately because of the culling measures to control its spread. Just over fourteen thousand have been killed as a result of control measure in the first three months of this year alone. Ten years ago less than half that number were dispatched in the whole year.

And it costs money too. Last year about eighty million pounds to the taxpayer, and millions more to the farming industry.

The possibility of a link between badgers and the spread of bovine TB first emerged blinking into the daylight in the early nineteen seventies when a badger which had died from bovine TB was found on a farm in Gloucestershire, in an area with a high number of cattle infections, technically known as breakdowns. An extensive programme of badger culling followed in the area and bovine TB disappeared from there, at least for the next ten years.

There followed years of the kind of deliberations which make this country great… or not as some would see it. Inquiries, followed reviews which went hand in hand with investigations…. And then in the late nineteen nineties a trial was ordered to see what impact different culling regimes might have on the spread of the disease. The Krebs trial, overseen by John… now Lord Krebs, an eminent zoologist, involved splitting up areas where bovine TB was rife into three zones, known as triplets. In one zone all the badgers were culled, in another badgers were only killed where there were outbreaks of TB, reactive culling, and the third zone was used as a control where no badgers were culled.

The trial was seriously disrupted by the foot and mouth disease outbreak of 2001 when no testing could take place because of access restrictions to the countryside, and received another huge blow two years later when reactive culling was suspended because it appeared to make the problem worse by dispersing the sick badgers to other uninfected areas.

The Krebs trial or to give it it’s `Sunday Name’ the Randomised Badger Culling Trial was overseen by a group of independent scientists, the Independent Scientific Group ISG which was asked to analyse and draw conclusions from what information was available from the Krebs Trial. Under John Bourne a formerly Professor of Animal Health at Bristol University the ISG deliberated for nearly ten year, and concluded that although total or almost total elimination of badgers over a wide area might have a role to play in the control of bovine TB the type of local culls envisaged by farmers would result in the `control of cattle TB in a manner which is economically viable’

Just a matter of weeks after the ISG’s recommendations were published, Sir David King the government’s own chief scientist lobbed a hand grenade into the proceedings, saying badgers represented a massive reservoir of TB in the wild, and called for selective culls in areas affected by the disease.

Which is where it’s very useful to have a minister who actually has something enlightening to say, and my ears pricked up at this year’s annual general meeting of the National Farmers Union, where during a debate which he was actually chairing …. I can think of few other government ministers could pull that one off … Lord Rooker put his finger on the reason why it had taken so long to reach a decision on whether or not badger culling should go ahead.

Agriculture Minister Lord Rooker

He basically said… and I’m working purely from memory here, as I was busy dealing with something else at the time and only half listening to the debate… `Look guys… I know you’re desperate … I know you want a decision, but the truth of the matter if that ministers can only act one scientific advice where that advice is clear cut, and at the moment there are two eminent scientific viewpoints which disagree, and if we’re not absolutely certain about the science, the first thing that will happen is an application for judicial review… and then the whole matter would be dragged through the courts just prolonging the difficulty of actually tackling the problem.’

My apologies if I didn’t get the exact wording of what he said but I think that’s a pretty accurate reflection. And it was fascinating, perhaps the government wasn’t scared of the public reaction to a possible cull, it was the likelihood that it would all end up in the courts, and if there’s one thing that politicians hate more than public disapproval of their policies, it’s the judiciary telling them they goofed.

Ironically as rumours of the government deciding against a cull start to circulate, so do rumours of possible legal action by the NFU. In the end the winners from bovine TB might turn out to be M’learned friends.