Professor Paul Torgerson's visit to Oxford on 18th Nov

Report on Professor Paul Torgerson's visit to Oxford on 18^th Nov for RBCT scientific seminar and Oxfordshire Badger Group  evening meeting.

We were delighted that Paul Torgerson, Professor of Veterinary Epidemiology at the Vetsuisse Faculty of the University of Zürich and lead author of a recent scientific paper published in Nature Scientific Reports, came to Oxford to headline two important meetings relating to the controversial badger culls.

The first was a seminar with invited guests from around the UK looking at the statistics of the Randomized Badger Culling Trial (RBCT) : the experiment that killed around 11,000 badgers and was the foundation of the introduction of the bovine TB and badger control strategy in England in 2011. This had followed the government chief scientist David King’s reinterpretation of the RBCT statistical results to claim a benefit could be had from removing the majority of badgers from an infected area.

Unfortunately all four members of the RBCT who are still active in Oxford or beyond did not attend the meeting. One was too busy, one had a prior appointment, one felt that there was no point in an Oxford seminar with Torgerson, as his views were well known, while another said there was no guarantee of a professional environment and it would change nothing in terms of policy. All a bit suspicious and sad. Government attendance was also poor. This was especially disappointing given the new government's indication that it wishes to consult widely and change the direction of the policy. Only one representative from the Oxford Biology Department attended which may be less surprising given that the matter has reached such high levels of notoriety within the town.

Prof Torgerson took the seminar through a short history of the epidemiology of cattle TB and focused on how the RBCT proactive badger culling statistical results had been written up in an unusual manner, that departed from the standard epidemiology approaches, although this was not obvious from the description in a key paper that was published in 2006, with fine print hidden in supplementary files.

Prof Torgerson’s work published in July 2024 had applied more plausible models and concluded that the Oxford RBCT findings implicating badgers could not be replicated. This work took ages to get through peer-review. In the meantime, a senior Oxford statistician and PhD student had taken  the models and code from Prof Torgerson’s paper preprint (available since December 2022) and used them to write a paper defending the RBCT's statistical methods.  Their paper was published in August 2024. Prof Torgerson’s paper rebutting Oxford’s interpretation  has not yet been published.

The seminar provided a range of useful contributions from professional biologists, veterinarians and animal welfare professionals. One disturbing report was of a situation where out of five TB breakdown herds known in one county, four were likely to be killing badgers unlawfully and outside the structure of ‘official’ culls.

Paul was kind enough to stay on and deliver an evening lecture to a larger public audience in the evening. This  included members of the Oxfordshire Badger Group who had helped fund the evening,  representatives of neighbouring badger Groups and the League Against Cruel Sports.

Julia Hammett, Chair of Oxfordshire Badger Group (OBG) opened the meeting with a summary of the Group’s efforts to raise awareness of Oxford University’s involvement in the cull. ‘Street Badger’ protests with a petition of 50,000 people calling on the scientists to be more open about the problems with the RBCT as a basis for the current culls had gained significant local media exposure. OBG’s efforts to engage with key RBCT academics and the Biology Department faculty had been met with sluggish and unhelpful responses. Around 7,000 badgers have been shot in Oxfordshire to date. A further year of culling was still anticipated with farmers radicalized against badgers and more likely to kill unlawfully in the future than vaccinate badgers. She thanked all those involved for a tremendous effort over the last 18 months.

Paul Torgerson then went over the material given to the earlier seminar and made the point irrespective of the  RBCT statistical methodology concerns, the original findings need to be reinterpreted in the light of new information about the disease. Importantly, the status of the results of the tuberculin skin test (SICCT) are now far better understood. It is now known that lesser reactors (skin thickenings) to the test previously termed ‘inconclusive’ are in fact true signs of new infection at standard interpretation.

The RBCT 2007 report only classified herds officially withdrawn (due to a clear +ve test) as ‘new herd breakdowns’ and all those with ‘inconclusive’  tests were excluded. This decision is no longer supportable. When all reactors’ are included in the analyses badger culling is shown to have no effect on the rate of new herd breakdowns – badger culling is futile. All of the multiple lines of evidence are pointing towards the lack of support for a ‘badger BTB perturbation hypothesis’ effect (badgers running around spreading bovine TB) and for the claimed disease control ‘benefit’ being an artifact of the way in which the data was handled.

Further and in terms of the huge sums of public finance paid to control the disease via culling and compensation, this was unnecessary as milk is pasteurized and the infection of people from meat was all but unknown. The disease could be managed along the lines of the successful control of paratuberculosis, a very similar organism that causes Johnes disease (wasting and diarrhea) in cattle. Control could be significant and faster, even within four years with the right testing approach, saving £200 million or more per year in taxpayer subsidy and industry costs and losses. Hence the entire policy guided by the RBCT had been misguided for years. There was a an urgent need to accept that culling badgers is not the answer and to rethink how best to control the disease.

An invited panel chaired by Born Free’s Dominic Dyer, including Prof Torgerson, Julia Hammett, Sally Jones from the Badger Trust and Rob Pownell from Protect The Wild provided their own insight and observations following questions from the floor. All in all, a thoroughly interesting, absorbing and slightly unsettling recognition of how and why research from Oxford University has been used to kill hundreds of thousands of our beautiful iconic badgers. A stain and a disgrace that tarnishes the reputation of Oxford and that will hopefully be ended before plans to cull more badgers in Oxfordshire in 2025 are realized.

Thanks are due to the many people helping to put the meeting together and to Paul Torgerson especially for giving his valuable time so freely to help our understanding of the issues and to help advance the concerns over the statistical approaches to key scientific research.

We also thank everyone who signed the OBG petition , everyone who took part in and supported our 'street badger' awareness raising campaign and all those who donated to help support the costs of the meeting.