Mar 7 2018: “Spent my career controlling livestock disease. Eradication of the bTB organism is impossible in the UK.”

Nigel Tolley, Badger Trust Trustee, has retweeted a message sent to him from Amelea Teckel: Former Deputy Chief Vet Alick Simmons tweeted this to me yesterday:

“Spent my career controlling livestock disease. Eradication of the bTB organism is impossible in the UK. The public health risk is under control – and has been since c.1960. Why waste £millions and kill our native wildlife on a hopeless cause?”
& on M.bovis:

“It’s a dreadful pathogen and it needs to be controlled – which is quite possible using the tools we have and without killing shedloads of animals. Control, as you know, is not the same as eradication. The latter is impossible in the UK.”

Now that would be something for the Farmers’ Guardian to tell its readers, wouldn’t it … the truth