UKH

Apparently it was brought here from New Zealand!! Anyway after all that hype it's now been subject to what cattle farmers live with on a day to day basis!!

I guess the difference is the cattle farmers sacrifice their animals for their (the farmers) own greater good. The alpaca was killed on behalf of the farmers. 

First they came for the alpacas
And I did not speak out
Because I was not an alpaca...

Bastards. 

I got the sense he meant that the same rules apply to all animals in the UK, regarding the prevention and management of disease, I can tend to be slightly abstract though, or tangential.

First they came for the badgers, actually...

Brian Maybe... Anyhow, it would have ended right there if they'd gone for the honey badger. 

I felt that this story was indicative of the rather broken relationship many people have to both animals and food production.

But Geronimo was more of a pet than a farm animal so emotions were running much higher, perhaps? I know that farmers get emotional about their animals being slaughtered, especially when herds and flocks have taken generations to build. If this had been foot and mouth on an adjacent farm Geronimo (and all the other alpacas) would have been doomed, infected or not. Apparently, he is being autopsied so we'll know for sure if he had TB.

Who are these people that have alpacas as pets?

And, within that group, who names them "Geronimo"?

Nuke it all from space.

I don't think either side comes out of this sorry episode with much credit.  The alpaca owner strikes me as overly sentimental and irresponsible, and DEFRA, although in a difficult position, could probably have handled the situation with a bit more imagination.

However, ultimately both sides were trapped by an outdated and ineffective TB control policy.  We know how to control TB and we didn't more or less eradicate it in our human population by euthanising every child with a positive Heaf test.  We did it by vaccination and improving housing conditions, and that's how we should deal with bovine TB too.

We need:

1. To validate and approve a test that can distinguish between a previously exposed (and possibly uninfected) or vaccinated animal, and an infected one.  We can no longer blame the EU for having to stick with the current test (if it ever was the EU that was the problem).

2. To roll out an effective vaccine (in development for ages but not really a priority until a new policy is agreed) 

3.  To  educate farmers about the problem with housing unvaccinated cattle in sheds at high densities for all or part of the year.

Surely by now it's obvious that the current policy of reactivity testing, quarantine and slaughter (and pointlessly culling badgers despite the evidence that it's counter-productive short of regional extermination) doesn't work, yet DEFRA's approach is to just carry on with more of the same.

Edit to correct typing faster than thinking...

Apparently the owner’s vet isn’t allowed to attend the autopsy. 

Appalling scenes on TV. I agree that both sides handled it very badly. The poor animal was clearly distressed and terrified as it was being taken away surrounded by the knacker men and police with demonstrators shouting in the background. Why couldn't it have been quietly put to sleep in it's field, by just the vet with the police keeping the crowd well away from them and out of earshot?

'Put to sleep.' Love it.

Sadly, I've had plenty of pets 'put to sleep' by vets and it's quite an appropriate term. They just switch off almost instantaneously, like the sudden onset of sleep with no apparent pain or distress. The kindest thing for them and the kindest way of expressing it. Still very upsetting. I hope Geronimo had a similar fate.

Yep, or just PTS according to my daughter.

100% agree with you Dave.

I worked with our neighbour on his  Irish  dairy farm for some years.  The following points I remember from our many discussions and what I remember reading about in various farming journals:-

a)  Its very difficult to catch bovine TB - my friend could only think of one or two cases he knew of - (My neighbour/friend was the SW Eire farmer's union representative) so he knew quite a lot of other farmers.  And in any case TB is easily cured now.

b)  Yes, badgers can pass TB on - and no doubt they can catch it from cattle too..  But so can housing cattle in close proximity in sheds throughout winter.  I seem to remember that human TB spread in crowded housing when I was a child.  An  aunty died of it.

c)  The test is not accurate.  After years and years of testing, they still use the same test which is not completely accurate.  What have the ministry vets been doing all these years?

.  If they were in charge of the Covid crisis we'd all be shipped off for slaughter.  Is that test the best we can manage?

d)  As its been said it is devastating when farmers have stock removed to 'control' the TB.  My friend the farmer was in tears when he lost 30 or so of his cattle.  "I've bred these myself, I knew and reared their parents and their parents too - I've know them all my life".  

Ironically, or sadly, he had to buy in some new dairy cattle - and unbeknown to him that had some awful fungal infection of the feet which made many of his stock lame!!.

We don't seem to be able to do much about Foot & Mouth either.  

Couple of interesting points of anecdata 

Defra are  ( in East Midlands at least) paying one group to vaccinate badgers and are now paying another group to cull the same animals!

Secondly, there is quite a bit of research on tb "strains" ( this isn't the right term, it isn't a strain/ variant, but it'll do for this ) in badgers from things like roadkill. Some of these strains appear to originate abroad- Spain for one. Given badgers are not mariners, this suggests they are being infected by imported farm animals. 

Tl/Dr tb transmission is not black and white,  Defra are hopeless.

And un the grand scheme of things, I'm not that bothered about one camelid, even though it must be heartbreaking for the owner, because the wider shitshow is   equally awful

Well, I can't spell youthanized.......

Yes, 'put to sleep' is an unusually literal euphemism. With a dog anyway, a cannula is inserted into a foreleg and an overdose of anaesthetic administered - falls asleep, and a minute or two later the heart stops.

Don't ask me how I know, it's too raw.

Are you sure that was the way it was done...?

The problem is that it's a DTH (delayed-type hypersensitivity) test (like the little circle of needle pricks the Heaf test leaves in your shoulder) that works by causing a lump as TB-reactive T-cells infiltrate the injection site.  If this happens, it means that the animal some a degree of immunity against TB, which could mean either that it has active TB, or that it has been exposed to TB but has cleared it, or that it doesn't have active TB but has little pockets of infection walled off which might or might not ever become active, or (experimentally) that it has been vaccinated against TB.

This means that not only do we probably cull quite a lot of cows that are not infected but, more importantly, that we can't use mass vaccination because then we'd have no way at all of identifying infected cows.  When human beings give positive test, we X-ray them for evidence of scarring or active infection in their lungs (and probably other tests by now) and, if we think they really are infected, give them a course of antibiotics.  Obviously this isn't practical for mass screening of cattle, so we need to generate a robust, high throughput, presumably PCR-based, test that can actually tell if bacterial DNA is present, not just TB-reactive T-cells.

As it happens, we've just developed a huge infrastructure for doing population scale PCR testing, so it's not like it's impossible.

(Sorry, missed the “didn’t”, and now can’t delete my stupid comment)

Thanks for that response Dave.  

I suppose an other issue is that up until the day they do the testing, then we may have already drank the milk from an infected animal - which could have been infected for months.  OK, I think pasteurisation of milk kills the TB, but un-pasteurised milk is still legally purchased and certainly  drunk on many farms with dairy cattle- isn't it?

I agree that a diagnostic test for presence of the pathogen and not for immune response is way more sensible than the current approach.  Until this thread I'd not realised how arse backwards it was.  Presumably the current test actually selects against cattle that successfully fight off TB as they'll get culled along with the infected, denying the chance for breeds to harden up to the point TB doesn't bother them...  ?

But...

I'm not sure that mass X-ray screening is impractical...  

• The last 20 years have seen massive advances in large format solid state electronic detectors, driven in part by security markets screening large items like 40' containers etc.  
• The Kromek EV3500 family for example - a linear energy-aware detector up to something like 1.2 meters in size; you could build a portable "cow gate" with source and detector on opposite sides around lung height, deployed and operated from a pickup truck or something. If you could then get the cattle to walk through one by one and have a camera reading their ear tags or temporarily stuck-on QR codes, x-rays can be reconstructed from the near-linear motion through the cow gate (aided by camera tracking) and tied to specific animals.  The kit could tour a lot of farms...  
• I don't know how well an x-ray could be reconstructed from the motion of a walking cow, but I do know specific examples of sample motion being tracked with a low res ~visible light system and used to improve/align the output of a separate high res system.  If the cow gate had multiple sources and detectors splayed over a range of angles, tomographic (volumetric) reconstruction should be possible.
• It would need an automated, high throughput system to analyse the images.  It's been a couple of years since I looked but there used to be a lot of people making a lot of noise about how AI/machine learning was going to transform radiology...  Although last time I met some they were asking the king for the finest silks and gold threads... 

This doesn't seem totally impractical to me, certainly an interesting research project...  

In reply to toad:

So not the badgers then!

That actually made me LOL! I must also make sure I don't step in that rocking horse sh..

Thanks very much for your very informative posts.

I think wintertree’s next billion is in the making!

Also. Please can I be ‘put to sleep’ when the time comes?

Some interesting and informative posts here. I can understand the court response - they were interpreting the law as it stands.

It does seem odd, and something that needs addressing, that as the the first positive test was years ago how none of the rest of the herd of alpacas have tested positive and that the Geronimo did not succumbed to bovine TB. The current test is, so I have read, not accurate in camelids, so I can understand the owners position.

However, give the law was going to be enacted I would have hoped, as suggested elsewhere, the police could have kept protestors and press well away and the owner could have helped to reduce the stress in the animal by leading it, rather than having a stranger dragging it away.

Dave

The owner refused to cooperate with the killing order (I understand her reasons), and protestors were there to try to stop the order being carried out. So it all got inevitably confrontational. I am not sure how that could have been avoided under the circumstances.

You do, don't you...

Your cow-scanning idea also reminds me of some of the stuff that's being done with ROVs deep underwater: https://twitter.com/MBARI_News/status/1268266221272576000 and  https://twitter.com/SchmidtOcean/status/1184663162374606848

I had a chat over a coffee with someone pre-pandemic about how one might go about processing datasets like that to correct for non-uniformities in the motion. Definitely some promising possibilities...

I too understand her reasons but hoped given the euthanasia was inevitable she would have been able to make the process as stress free as possible for the animal. Not easy I accept but perhaps the final few minutes of its life could have been made a little easier. I also don't know why the vehicle they put the alpaca in could not have been driven closer to where the animal was kept.

An unfortunate outcome but I hope it might encourage another look at the control of bovine TB, though I'll not hold my breath.

Dave

As an optical reconstruction of a mostly translucent and free swimming creature, that Jellyfish scan is fantastic.

I hope you gave them a book on Kalman filters and not AI/ML...  Tomographic multi-sensor data fusion of moving stuff looks like a good area to be in.

TB or not TB?

That is the question for Geronimo.

Human TB is not so easily cured now, it's becoming increasingly antibiotic resistant. There are 2 approaches for "ordinary" TB disease (i.e. pulmonary) 1 antibiotic for 6 months or 2 for 3 months. Neither approach is guaranteed to work (i.e. get rid of TB), but certainly guaranteed to cause unpleasant side effects. TB in bones and some other forms of extra pulmonary TB disease, is even worse and very much not straightforward, they can be very difficult to treat

Interesting.  Thanks for that.

Do you know anything about how people who are naturally immune fare? I turned out to not need one of those jabs in the upper arm when I was at school.

My sister in law had her horse put down the other week. She was holding the horse while the vet administered the injection, it got a big adrenaline rush, jerked violently and the needle ended up going into SiL's arm.

The receptionist at A&E asked what she was in for, and she explained the vet was putting her horse to sleep and she got accidentally stabbed with the needle. 

"Awww, and you're worried you might go to sleep too?"

Apparently the reply "well yes, my horse won't be waking up ever again and I am slightly concerned I might not either" changed both the look on the face of the receptionist and the speed at which the booking in took place.

Cripes! When they go well euthanasia’s can be great for all concerned - but when they go wrong they can be pretty harrowing, and for large animal potentially dangerous.

Badgers are, though. And cows.

Hmmm... I see a pattern here...