Around £36.5 million has been paid out in compensation for slaughtered cattle who have reacted to a standard tuberculin skin test. £14.5m of that was paid in 2018-19. Since the test is liable to produce false positives - and militates against inoculation of animals - it seems to me that if the same amount of money had been put into research for a better diagnostic over the years, then this would not be such an issue now.
Farmers have predictably responded with a call to eliminate badgers. However, the technical advice from Northern Ireland, which has a good record on bovine TB is that: "There is a perception that if a badger cull is carried out locally or throughout NI, that all TB problems will disappear. This is unlikely to be the case as TB is a multi-factorial disease with several different methods of spread."
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