Vets in bull TB case ‘have no lessons to learn’

GOVERNMENT vets think they have no lessons to learn from the case of Hallmark Boxster, the Yorkshire bull which spent 18 months under threat of slaughter and was then declared clear of TB.

Today’s Country Week reports responses by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to questions raised by the case and put to its Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency by the Yorkshire Post, on behalf of the bull’s owners, Ken and Anita Jackson of Stubbs Walden, near Doncaster. The Department effectively says its confidence in its test procedures is unshaken.

However the Jackson family are not satisfied with the answers, having spent thousands of pounds fighting to prove a mistake in the procedure which said their British Blonde bull had the disease.

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And Rethink Bovine TB, a campaign against Government policy, says Defra continues to make “seriously misleading” statements about the accuracy of its tests.

In relation to the blood test which went wrong in Boxster’s case, Defra told the Yorkshire Post: “The interferon-gamma test has a very high degree of accuracy and about 97 percent of cattle that test positive will be true positives.”

Michael Ritchie, a spokesman for Rethink BTB, said yesterday: “According to Defra publications, the specificity of the interferon gamma test is 95 to 97 percent. The way it defines specificity is that it is a measure of the proportion of false positives for a given number of animals tested, not for a given number of positive test results.

“Defra are seriously misleading farmers and taxpayers by stating that ‘about 97 per cent of cattle that test positive to this test will be true positives’. The truth, on its own evidence, is that for every 100 cattle tested, between three and five will be false positives, regardless of the number of true positives.

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“This lack of accuracy is resulting in a large number of cattle being condemned in error.”

As reported last month in the Yorkshire Post, Boxster was officially given the all-clear after spending nearly 18 months in quarantine. He was finally freed from his pen in August and is now back amongst his cows at Forlorn Hope Farm. But the Jackson family are still looking for compensation.

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