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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment her Department has made of the potential merits of vaccinating all cattle against the TB virus.

Vaccination of cattle against the bovine TB bacterium is a part of our long-term eradication strategy. There are merits to cattle vaccination as it has the potential to reduce the prevalence, incidence and spread of TB. As with badgers, however, BCG (M. bovis - bacille Calmette-Guérin) vaccination is not completely effective, and has no impact on already infected cattle. It also sensitises cattle to the tuberculin skin test used to identify animals infected with TB, so we need to licence an effective test that differentiates between the disease and the vaccine before deployment would be possible.