The Food and Environment Research Agency, York, North Yorkshire, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2012;7(6):e39250. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0039250. Epub 2012 Jun 27.
Bovine tuberculosis (bTB), caused by Mycobacterium bovis, continues to be a serious economic problem for the British cattle industry. The Eurasian badger (Meles meles) is partly responsible for maintenance of the disease and its transmission to cattle. Previous attempts to manage the disease by culling badgers have been hampered by social perturbation, which in some situations is associated with increases in the cattle herd incidence of bTB. Following the licensing of an injectable vaccine, we consider the relative merits of management strategies to reduce bTB in badgers, and thereby reduce cattle herd incidence. We used an established simulation model of the badger-cattle-TB system and investigated four proposed strategies: business as usual with no badger management, large-scale proactive badger culling, badger vaccination, and culling with a ring of vaccination around it. For ease of comparison with empirical data, model treatments were applied over 150 km(2) and were evaluated over the whole of a 300 km(2) area, comprising the core treatment area and a ring of approximately 2 km. The effects of treatment were evaluated over a 10-year period comprising treatment for five years and the subsequent five year period without treatment. Against a background of existing disease control measures, where 144 cattle herd incidents might be expected over 10 years, badger culling prevented 26 cattle herd incidents while vaccination prevented 16. Culling in the core 150 km(2) plus vaccination in a ring around it prevented about 40 cattle herd breakdowns by partly mitigating the negative effects of culling, although this approach clearly required greater effort. While model outcomes were robust to uncertainty in parameter estimates, the outcomes of culling were sensitive to low rates of land access for culling, low culling efficacy, and the early cessation of a culling strategy, all of which were likely to lead to an overall increase in cattle disease.
牛型结核（bTB）是由牛分枝杆菌引起的，它仍然是英国养牛业的一个严重的经济问题。欧亚獾（Meles meles）在一定程度上导致了这种疾病的维持及其向牛群的传播。过去，通过扑杀獾来控制这种疾病的尝试受到了社会干扰的阻碍，在某些情况下，这种干扰与牛群 bTB 发病率的增加有关。在一种可注射疫苗获得许可后，我们考虑了减少獾中 bTB 的管理策略的相对优点，从而降低牛群的发病率。我们使用了一个已建立的獾-牛-TB 系统模拟模型，并研究了四种建议的策略：不进行獾管理的常规管理、大规模主动扑杀獾、獾疫苗接种和在其周围进行扑杀与疫苗接种相结合。为了便于与经验数据进行比较，模型处理应用于 150 平方公里（2）的面积，并在包含核心处理区域和大约 2 公里的环形区域的 300 平方公里（2）的整个区域进行评估。在现有的疾病控制措施的背景下，10 年内可能会出现 144 例牛群发病事件，扑杀可以预防 26 例牛群发病事件，而疫苗接种则可以预防 16 例。在核心的 150 平方公里（2）中进行扑杀，并在其周围进行环形疫苗接种，可以预防大约 40 例牛群发病事件，这在一定程度上减轻了扑杀的负面影响，但这种方法显然需要更多的努力。虽然模型结果对参数估计的不确定性具有稳健性，但扑杀的结果对扑杀的土地准入率低、扑杀效果低以及扑杀策略的过早停止都很敏感，所有这些都可能导致牛群疾病的总体增加。
