Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment he has made of the accuracy of the analysis in the paper, Meta analyses of the sensitivity and specificity of ante-mortem and post-mortem diagnostic tests for bovine tuberculosis in the UK and Ireland, published in March 2018 that the median sensitivity estimate for the SICCT test is between 49 per cent and 65 percent; and what the implications are of that analysis for the information contained on the Government-sponsored web site, TB Hub.

The 2018 paper (Nuñez-Garcia et al) used data derived from different studies carried out in different countries and under different field and laboratory conditions. This data presented different scenarios to that experienced in Great Britain. Therefore our evidence base for the SICCT test will continue to be based on two recent and bespoke studies (Karolemeas et al. (2012) and Goodchild et al. (2015)), as detailed on the TB Hub website.