TB testing is far too strict as cows are slaughtered that shouldn’t be

We are seeing a number of dairy farmers retiring from milking cows because of the strict rules from a minute number of suspected TB reactors.

While we wouldn’t wish to see TB return to the population, it might interest those who are so concerned about TB to note that when I was at school in the late fifties, we had the pre-jab for TB to see if we reacted to the TB virus.

Many of us from the farming community did react, and we then had to go to the local hospital for an X-Ray. We all had a natural immunity to TB.

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Talking to several of those young people since, I have discovered we all were reared on unpasteurized milk, and there was a small number of cattle with a small infection.

All these rules of slaughtering animals that may have failed a TB test, and when they have been slaughtered and analysed have no trace of TB anyway.

I remember 20 local farmers in one village milking cows, now there are just two.

Unless we take a long look at food security we will have no working farms, the countryside will become a wilderness, and we will rely on imported food.

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With the world population growing at the pace it is now, that food will not be available.

It would appear the Government and DEFRA are destroying the livelihood and farming communities at their peril.

Laurence Keeley,

Fairfield

Herstmonceux

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