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Addendum and reservation by Sir Charles Harris.
The question what steps are practicable is so closely linked with finance that I hope it may be not altogether unprofitable if I attempt -not as a dissent from section IX but as an addendum to it-to carry a stage further some of the inevitable financial questions arising out of our recommendations. We put forward an active campaign to eradicate tuberculosis from milch cattle, not only as the necessary long-range cure for unsafe milk, but also as best reconciling the urgent claims of public health with due consideration for many thousands of farming families. In this second sphere, in particular, the time-factor is in conflict with the limitations of trained staff and money; and it will be useful at the outset to have some yard-stick as a rough measure of the order of magnitudes involved. The figures throughout are illustrative rather than accurate.
(i) The time-table.
As the best measure to hand I take the experience of the veterinary officer who supervised the recent Hannah eradication experiment in Ayrshire. He found that one whole-time man could comfortably supervise at least 100 herds of 50 cattle each in process of eradication by the methods we recommend, making a very generous allowance for time taken in visiting and advising herd-owners and other incidental work; and on this basis he puts the cost of staff, travelling and tuberculin, &c., at £1,000 a year for 5,000 cattle, At this rate, to with an average clean-up period of four years. clean up 3 million cattle (allowing a little for growth of numbers) at the rate of half a million in each four-year period, would occupy 100 veterinary officers for twenty-eight years or, counting on accelerated progress towards the end, say twenty-five years, at a cost, for staff and incidentals, of £100,000 a year.
A rough departmental calculation shows that a producer-retailer population of milking cattle (all in flying herds) would require, to keep it supplied with heifers, free from tuberculosis and consequently living (say) six years in the herd, clean breeding cattle in the proportion of about 85 per cent. of its strength. The first half-million cattle cleaned up would therefore give milking herds of 270,000 cattle with 230,000 breeders in support-sufficient (if the milkers were all sold to producer-retailers) to meet the requirements of all the principal towns of Great Britain without recourse to compulsory pasteurisation and, even if considerable numbers went to producer- wholesaler herds, to show that the problem was well on the way to solution. The first questions (assuming the approximate correctness of these figures to have been established) are therefore (1) whether
campaign progress at a rate conditioned by 100 officers doing duty would be accepted as satisfactory, and (2) how soon that strength could be realised and the necessary funds found. Nothing has come before us to suggest that this rate of progress could be exceeded at the beginning of the campaign. These campaign
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officers are additional to the 300 clinical inspectors of paragraph 184, costing from £250,000 to £800,000 (paragraph 222); but desirable as it is to introduce routine inspection in every county of England and Wales at the earliest practicable date, its small results in the direction of eradication suggest that priority might be given to the campaign, in allocating the time of the combined staff. For accepted herds, periodically tuberculin-tested, routine clinical examination for tuberculosis will be superfluous.
The present expenditure on compensation under the tuberculosis order should be stopped (as proposed in paragraph 225) at the earliest possible moment, and the relief to the Exchequer thus secured should be taken into consideration in settling the amount of the new Exchequer contribution proposed in paragraph 177.
(2) Farm costs of eradication.
FI
The Agricultural Economics Research Institute of Oxford, in 1926, from costings on some twenty farms (spread over a wide area), which, starting from the then prevailing standard of milk," had raised themselves to the standard of grade A (T.T), found an extra cost for the latter of 2·88d. per gallon, leaving a small increase of profit out of an extra price of 3d. That standard does not aim at eradication, but requires the periodical removal of all reactors; and no further special measures seem to have been taken. Eradication, on a scale involving not immediate sale of reactors, but their complete isolation while retained, would in some cases involve fresh expen- diture on buildings; and we have recommended loans to meet such expenditure where necessary. With this exception the continuing costs of eradication, equally with those of grade A (T.T.), come under the Institute's conclusion that there is only a minor difference in the actual cost between grade A and grade A (T.T.) milk . difference for the two grades amounts merely to about 14s. per cow for actual testing, and an average of about 10s, per cow per year for elimination of reactors
there is little more than d. i gallon difference. In other words, the extra cost in eradication consists only of those items for which our scheme makes special provision, and any other extra expenditure necessary pertains not to safety but to cleanliness. In this latter respect there has been great progress since 1926, and we now propose the enforcement of an adequate standard on all producers alike, as a condition of remaining in the business.
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The above figures take no account of the future gain by the elimination of the losses (paragraph 13) of £2,500,000 by curtail- ment of productive life and over £500,000 by condemnation of meat, through disease; but nearly the whole of the latter arises from tubercle, and this loss together with the loss of meat from cows which because of tubercle do not reach the slaughterhouse at all must reach a much higher figure, placed in a departmental estimate by the Ministry of Agriculture at between £1,000,000 and £1,500,000. We are unable to separate the contributions of different
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