(2) how much compensation was paid to farmers in Eddisbury constituency for the slaughter of cattle with bovine tuberculosis in each year since 2001.
Routine cattle herd testing for bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in Great Britain uses the single intradermal comparative cervical tuberculin (SICCT) test (commonly known as the “skin test”).
Research shows that when the skin test is applied to cattle in bTB-free herds in Great Britain, there is a less than one in 1,000 chance that a non-infected animal will be wrongly classified as a reactor. This is known as the test’s false positive rate. An alternative way of defining this is to say that the skin test has a specificity in excess of 99.9 per cent. Although the probability of getting at least one false positive result increases with the size of the herd being tested, it would be extremely rare to find more than one false positive in a herd.
When considering the false positive issue it is important to bear in mind that failure to confirm the disease by post-mortem examination at the slaughterhouse, or by culturing the causative bacterium in the laboratory, does not mean that the animal was not infected with bTB. In the early stages of this infectious disease, it is not always possible to see lesions with the naked eye and, due to the fastidious nature of the organism, it is not possible to culture it from tissue samples in every case. Because of this it is not possible to give a meaningful figure for the number of false positive test results.
Statistics on cattle slaughtered under bTB control measures are not collected on a constituency basis, but at county level. The following table shows the number of cattle slaughtered under TB control measures in Cheshire in the last five years:
Number of TB reactors slaughtered Total number of cattle slaughtered1 20062 120 149 20052 140 248 2004 285 425 2003 422 874 20023 299 393
Details of compensation paid to farmers for the slaughter of cattle under bTB control measures are not available on either a constituency or a county basis. The following table shows the number of animals slaughtered under TB control measures in Great Britain in each year since 2001 and the amount of compensation paid as a result:
Financial year Total number of cattle slaughtered1 Compensation paid (£ million) 20062 22,242 28.2 20052 30,081 42.8 2004 23,064 33.8 2003 23,821 38.2 20023 23,744 23.1 20013 6,549 7.1 1 TB reactors, inconclusive reactors and direct contacts. 2 Provisional data, subject to change as more data become available. 3 In 2001, the TB testing and control programme was largely suspended due to the foot and mouth disease (FMD) outbreak. When testing resumed in 2002, resources were concentrated on herds with overdue TB tests which would have had a longer period in which to contract the disease. Also the proportion of high risk herds tested immediately after the FMD outbreak was greater than that prior to the outbreak. As a result, data for 2001 and 2002 are not comparable with other years.