Paratuberculosis (paraTB or Johne’s disease) is a persistent endemic cattle disease, the control of which remains a challenge nationally, as well as abroad. Understanding the efficacy of current control measures provides crucial information for farmers and other stakeholders on whether to continue with current measures or to seek uptake of potentially more effective controls. With researchers from SRUC, BioSS is working to combine data and knowledge from epidemiology, applied agricultural economics, and behavioural science to develop a multi-disciplinary approach to biosecurity. This involves analysing data from the Premium Cattle Health Scheme (PCHS) to quantify the success of the current scheme, defined by farm uptake and ability of farms to become clear of disease. The results of this analysis will also be used to inform parameters for future modelling activities, where these will, for the first time, quantify the impact of the PCHS. 

The Premium Cattle Health Scheme has been operating in Scotland for over two decades, with high levels of long-term membership. This scheme provides a testing programme for farms to test their herds for a large range of livestock diseases, including Johne’s disease. Despite this, Johne’s disease remains endemic across the industry, and differing attitudes regarding the need to control this disease hinder the ability of stakeholders to reduce disease burden at the national level. PCHS records the testing history of individual farms as well as the results of these tests at the animal level. 

BioSS is working with SRUC collaborators to analyse this data set, aiming to extract critical information on, for example, herd prevalence over time, the time required to remove disease from a farm, how long farms remain disease free, and the frequency of reintroduction of disease to farms. These outputs will be used to quantify and communicate the effectiveness of the scheme to encourage continued scheme membership as well as encouraging new, non-member farms, to join. BioSS will integrate these outputs with cattle movement data to parameterise models of the Scottish cattle trade industry, providing new insights into how scheme membership may change individual farm trading patterns and what, if any, stakeholder intervention is needed to maintain farm business needs. Furthermore, BioSS will use these models to provide estimates of how the prevalence of Johne’s disease of non-member farms compares with PCHS members. Currently, this information is unavailable but is of vital importance to stakeholders and the Scottish government to assess the effectiveness of the PCHS as currently implemented. 

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This work was done in collaboration with Ross Davidson and Mike Hutchings at SRUC and was funded under the Underpinning National Capacity element of the Scottish Government's Strategic Research Programme for environment, agriculture and food.