WELCOME TO THE CFZ BLOG NETWORK: COME AND JOIN THE FUN

Half a century ago, Belgian Zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans first codified cryptozoology in his book On the Track of Unknown Animals.

The Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) are still on the track, and have been since 1992. But as if chasing unknown animals wasn't enough, we are involved in education, conservation, and good old-fashioned natural history! We already have three journals, the largest cryptozoological publishing house in the world, CFZtv, and the largest cryptozoological conference in the English-speaking world, but in January 2009 someone suggested that we started a daily online magazine! The CFZ bloggo is a collaborative effort by a coalition of members, friends, and supporters of the CFZ, and covers all the subjects with which we deal, with a smattering of music, high strangeness and surreal humour to make up the mix.

It is edited by CFZ Director Jon Downes, and subbed by the lovely Lizzy Bitakara'mire (formerly Clancy), scourge of improper syntax. The daily newsblog is edited by Corinna Downes, head administratrix of the CFZ, and the indexing is done by Lee Canty and Kathy Imbriani. There is regular news from the CFZ Mystery Cat study group, and regular fortean bird news from 'The Watcher of the Skies'. Regular bloggers include Dr Karl Shuker, Dale Drinnon, Richard Muirhead and Richard Freeman.The CFZ bloggo is updated daily, and there's nothing quite like it anywhere else. Come and join us...

Search This Blog

WATCH OUR WEEKLY WEBtv SHOW

SUPPORT OTT ON PATREON

SUPPORT OTT ON PATREON
Click on this logo to find out more about helping CFZtv and getting some smashing rewards...

SIGN UP FOR OUR MONTHLY NEWSLETTER



Unlike some of our competitors we are not going to try and blackmail you into donating by saying that we won't continue if you don't. That would just be vulgar, but our lives, and those of the animals which we look after, would be a damn sight easier if we receive more donations to our fighting fund. Donate via Paypal today...




Monday, July 25, 2011

BADGERS: This came in the post

http://blog.38degrees.org.uk/2011/07/19/badgers-trial-shoots-to-go-ahead/

Today, the government announced it plans to go ahead with two trials of shooting badgers. This would be part of measures to reduce the spread of disease – bovine TB – between different herds of cattle. Badgers can carry the disease and as a result many farmers are keen to reduce their numbers as they think it’s essential for controlling the disease. Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary, says she is “strongly minded” to back the shooting of badgers.

Read on...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

To understand what is going on here, you have to know a little of the history of bovine TB (bTB) in Britain. Firstly, the bTB agent isn't host-specific; it can cause disease in cattle, sheep, badgers, humans, deer and even camelids (it seems to hit alpacas especially hard). Back in the 1940s, bTB was endemic in Britain and readily jumped species from cows to badgers and back.

Cattle testing based on immune reaction to bTB antigen was introduced and this allowed infected cows to be found and culled. This effectively stamped chronic bTB out of the cattle herd, but badgers remained infected. Culling infected setts by gassing with hydrogen cyanide was introduced, and by the 1980s had almost wiped out bTB in Britain; had the campaign been carried on this would have been achieved by the early 1990s.

However, the badger culling was suspended, and this led us to the present situation. With strong protection badger populations increased greatly, but with them spread the bTB infection from hotspots in Devon and Gloucestershire out to the present widespread area all over southern Britain. Cattle breakdowns (positive tests for bTB) were rare in the 1980s; presently they are common and getting commoner, and the amount of compensation for culled cows is rising steadily; last year's total was around £80 million.

So we are led to the current situation. Badgers are getting to be endemically infected with bTB, and badgers don't respond well to bTB infection; they have a very poor immune response to it, and suffer rapid and widespread disease. Vaccine trials on them also demonstrate that even injections of huge doses of vaccine don't have all that much protective effect; there is not an oral vaccine for badgers yet (this would need to be partly transgenic to be effective), and given how poor the response to BCG was, there is unlikely to be one.

Vaccinating cows against bTB is also out of the question. The vaccine for bTB is live, weakened bTB bacteria; the immune response thus generated is identical to that from naturally infected animals. As it happens bTB is rather good at evading immune responses; the humoral inflammation response is the only one which really slows it down. Cows are actually quite resistant to bTB; badgers alas are extremely poor at this.

The Government now cannot let this one lie, since to do so is to risk Britain being declared to have endemic TB (which cuts out our dairy export market), and in any case will only lead to a steady rise in compensation for culled cows as the disease spreads through the badger populations. Local badger culling is the only option left, unfortunately.