Doubts concerning the analysis of data collected in areas surrounding badger culled areas of the RBCT
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Epidemiology, Infectious Diseases, Statistics
- Keywords
- bovine tuberculosis, rbct, badger culling
- Copyright
- © 2016 Hendy
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Doubts concerning the analysis of data collected in areas surrounding badger culled areas of the RBCT. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2376v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2376v1
Abstract
In a report issued to the UK government in 2007 on the Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT), it was stated that the incidence of bovine tuberculosis (TB) in cattle increased in areas surrounding where badgers were removed. It is known that badger culling perturbs badgers and this leads to increased TB transmission in and around these treated areas. The increase in TB in the surrounding areas was attributed to this process.
In this study of the RBCT analysis it was found that large TB increases in areas surrounding proactively treated areas depended heavily on adjustments made for pre-cull history. This work looks at the basis for applying these adjustments. Since it is not possible to remove statistical error in the data, which confidence intervals suggest may have been large, it is argued that it was unsafe to apply these adjustments. As such it is argued that TB increases due to perturbation in the report presented to the UK government in 2007 may have been grossly over-estimated.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.