3 Replies to “Saturday cartoon by Ralph Underhill”

  1. If only vaccinating Badgers was a viable proposition.
    Is the vaccine reliably effective.
    Can we catch every Badger each year.
    Would anyone come up with the cash for a program that has to run for several years.
    Seeing as vaccine even if perfect does not obviously cure those already infected Badgers would the young each year get infected as the Sett must be the most infective place.
    Think before we think vaccination will solve our problems we need answers to all the above.
    Cannot see anyone putting in the effort to catch each year I think the population is 600,000 and growing each year.

  2. I don’t know if there is any prospect of an oral vaccine for badgers but I recall reading about a vaccination programme in – I think – North America against – I think – rabies in – I think – racoons (sorry for being so hazy on the details but memory fails…). The vaccine was in oral baits that were scattered widely across the landscape. The baits also included a marker chemical that caused distinctive coloration of teeth so that it was possible to sample the population and estimate the proportion of the population that had been vaccinated.
    Does anyone know any more about this? Of course there may be factors in the biology of both the badger and the TB bacterium that mean such an approach would not work but I’d be interested to know if it has been considered.
    It is not necessary to vaccinate every single badger by the way, Dennis, just a large enough proportion of the population to confer ‘herd immunity’. That is still a lot of badgers of course and I am not suggesting that it would be either cheap or easy to control TB in badgers by vaccination. (But then it has proven to be neither cheap nor easy to cull them, at least by humane means…).

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