UK Statistics on Bovine TB

UK - The latest national statistics produced by Defra on the Incidence of TB in Cattle - Great Britain were released this week according to the arrangements approved by the UK Statistics Authority.

25 April 2008

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These statistics are obtained from the Animal Health’s work management IT support system (Vetnet), used for the administration of TB testing and provide a snapshot of the position on the date on which they were extracted.

The data are subject to revision until all test results are available. In particular figures from 2002 onwards will be subject to further revision as various final data validation exercises are carried out.

The provisional January 2008 estimate lies above the incidence rate for January 2007. However, care needs to be taken not to read too much into a single month's figure, especially as this figure includes a high number of unclassified incidents. As such the incidence rates are subject to further revisions as more tests and their results are input.
Provisional statistics show a 4% increase in the number of new TB incidents in January 2008 compared to the same period in 2007. Combined with a drop in the number of herds tested over the same period, this equates to a provisional overall increase in the TB incidence rate (new TB incidents, as a proportion of tests on unrestricted herds) of 19%.
The average confirmed incidence rate (confirmed new TB incidents, as a proportion of tests on unrestricted herds) was 4.5% for January 2008, compared to 3.4% for the same period in 2007.

The charts published in this statistical notice, together with the equivalent figures from January 1996 onwards, are also available in spreadsheet format on the Defra web site at
http://statistics.defra.gov.uk/esg/datasets/tbweb.xls.

Chart 1 below shows TB incidence for the more recent data.