Randomised Badger Culling Trial: How big was the perturbation effect?
- 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. Randomised Badger Culling Trial: How big was the perturbation effect? PeerJ Preprints 4:e2376v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2376v2
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 over-estimated.
Author Comment
The title has been changed to a shorter, more pertinent title.
The Results section has been extended to include another graph of calculated cull benefits.