Day 4: M.bovis 2014

The final day of the conference, and yet another sunny day in Cardiff. There may have been some sore heads though after the conference dinner the night before. Mae hen wlad fy Nhadau may still have been ringing in some of their ears.

Conference dinner selfie, but no sign of Delilah

If they were nursing hangovers, they would have missed a great final day featuring papers and plenaries relating to TB in wildlife. There was plenty about TB in badgers, lots about wild boar from the Spanish contingent, as well as discussions about Elk and White Tailed Deer in Michigan and Canada.

The conference was then summed up with a kind of progress report on the countries around the world with TB - leaders: Australia; laggards - Great Britain.

The wildlife papers were interesting for a couple of reasons. I was struck by the low levels of TB in the wildlife but as was pointed out to me, their control is often driven by fear of having much higher levels of TB if they don't stamp it out. The New Zealanders like to use the phrase 'taking your foot of the gas', or throat. That is, you don't stop until its completely over: not nearly, but completely.

Another  explanation relates more to the ways in which nature is understood, and how it fits with other concepts such as wilderness, nature and landscape.

Todd Shury's presentation concerning TB in Elk in Canada captured this well. TB Elk live in Riding Mountain National Park. Elk numbers were reduced as a way of managing TB - Shury showed that there was a relationship between population density and TB. But the reduction of Elk was also permitted by the way Elk were perceived to fit into a wilderness landscape. Before carrying out Elk control, they carried out a lot of stakeholder consultation. As in many of these cases, there is conflict between farmers (concerned about TB), hunters (who want to preserve wildlife for the hunting value) and no doubt others who see Elk and the landscape for its intrinsic value. It became clear during these consultations that Elk reduction related to perceptions of the way those Elk fitted into a 'natural wilderness' landscape. The Elk belonged there; they created meaning for that place. But that place had to be natural, and there was a sense of their being 'too many' Elk in the park. This is the natural balance / natural equilibrium discourse that so often comes up in environmental management controversies (something which also comes up in relation to badgers). Perhaps also, the need to do something about TB in Elk reflected the need for wilderness - i.e. national parks - to be spaces of 'pure' nature - that wilderness has a certain natural (and moral) order, disease not being part of it, a sign of human interference. Again, this relates to the equilibrium discourse where people describe 'right' levels for nature. Where natural populations become diseased, so those populations have become less natural, and nature needs a helping hand from humans to get back to being natural.

The talks about TB in Michigan fitted well with the Canadian story. Melinda Cosgrove described how bans on feeding deer were ignored (as a way of managing the population) because people cared for the animals in the winter. They couldn't stand by and watch them suffer during hard winters so provided additional feed when they shouldn't have. The public's caring for those individual animals was a contrast to the Michigan Government' desire to care for the deer population as a whole - by allowing numbers to reduce 'naturally' by denying feed etc.

By contrast, Dan O'Brien's talk showed that when people profess a desire to reduce populations they don't tend to follow through with actions. Michigan liberalised their hunting permits to allow farmers and landowners to shoot deer when they wanted. It turned out that despite this opportunity, few could be bothered. Whether this was down to not believing they'd make much difference, not believing that that there was a problem with the population or individuals wasn't clear - it would be fascinating to explore those issues further.

So that was M.bovis for another 4 years. The next conference will be in 2018. It'll be a toss up between South Africa, Mexico and Dublin. Wherever it is, Im looking forward to it.

Day 3: M.bovis 2014

So on to day 3, another sunny day in Cardiff.

This was the day when I was doing my plenary talk. I think it went well. I had lots of positive comments which ranged from 'neat' and 'cool' to 'well done'. Spot the nationalities in those comments. Some people find presenting really quite easy and can stand in a room of 300 people and talk away without notes. Other people, like myself, get a bit stressed by this prospect: not outwardly, but it requires a great deal of focus and concentration beforehand. This means that it can be difficult to concentrate on any talks beforehand. Which was a shame, because directly before my talk Douwe Bakker was talking about the quality of tuberculin, how it was very poor, the difficulties of standardisation, the variations in its quality and what that means for test results. He was talking about it as a scientist, but for a social scientist interested in what disease actually is, and its multiple forms, it was amazing. But like I said, I was trying to focus...

I suppose you get a feeling of knowing when a talk is going well or not. I had 45 minutes to work that out! You can get that sense of flow and things fitting together nicely. I felt a lot of responsibility not just to present something interesting, but to present something on behalf of my colleagues: to bang the drum for social science. That adds to the pressure, and it was great to hear their feedback afterwards as well. All of that meant that it I was quite exhausted afterwards: using cycling language, I'd blown up. Recovery took a while...

What picked me out of my post-plenary glaze was the New Zealanders talking about their new NAIT electronic ID system. I know a little bit about this, so it was good to hear Stu Hutchings and Kevin Crews talk about it in more depth. The tracing capabilities are fantastic and they're are now able to show the movements of cattle across NZ. This is particularly important given the rapid expansion of the Dairy industry in NZ at the moment. I know some people are surprised that NZ dont already have that kind of system. What I found most interesting was how it would lead to changes in their risk based trading system. Farmers have become used to describing themselves in terms of their C-status. Thats going to change. Itll be interesting to see how they react.

The conference dinner was in the evening which was great. We were entertained by a Welsh male voice choir who sang in A cappella style. Some good Welsh favourites like Calon Lan and Myfanwy were in there. But strangely they sang no Tom Jones, not even Delilah. In A Cappella the singers dance along to the music to act out the song. Surely a version of Tom Jones' Sexbomb would have been ideal?!

Day 2: M.bovis 2014

So on to day 2 in sunny Cardiff for M.bovis 2014, and two plenaries stood out: Ian Boyd's and Peter Roeder's. Both were interesting for different reasons - here's what I found interesting.

1. Ian Boyd's talk covered some issues which he has already spoken about in different places already: the politicisation of science being one. He said some controversial things about the Badger Protection Act which sent my twitter feed into haywire when I tweeted it. You can check that out for yourself. But I think its important to put what he said into context. Personally, I don't like hypothetical questions: I dont think good research comes of it (although some economists and psychologists would probably disagree). Ian Boyd was asked one such question: Q: 'what would you do if you had a time machine and could go back to 1973?' A: '[long pause] hmm, Id probably advise not passing the badger protection act...'. Are these sorts of questions meaningful? Its certainly useful to look back at history to understand why and how things have happened. But worrying about 'woulda, shoulda, coulda' is the preserve of football pundits, not scientists. No-one knows what would have happened: isnt it better to spend your energy on thinking about what to do next? These sorts of questions also provide a sort of accountability test: its a bit of a loaded question. Questions are tests - I think Ian Boyd may have even wondered aloud that he was being tested. Answers can be 'right' or 'wrong', and the answers we give account for who we are and who we belong to: its like we're being asked whose side are you on here? Are you with 'us', or against 'us'? Maybe in his long pause to think about what to say, that's what was going through his mind?

2. Peter Roeder's talk on the eradication of Rinderpest was fascinating. It was interesting because of the emphasis he placed on the role of socio-economic research in eradicating disease. 'Without it', he said, 'we wouldnt have got where we did'. 'If only we had that data earlier' he reflected. 'The social was more important that the technical' he said. But on the technical he was also interesting. One of his themes was about the imperfection of diagnostics. 'Don't worry about it' he suggested, 'you don't always need new technology - in some cases (thinking of working in Africa) it can be more harm than good'. So long as you know the limitations of your tools, you can work with them and adapt to them. Adaptive management is the key. The idea of imperfection in systems is an interest to social scientists too. Is there really a perfect system? Does the idea of a perfect system perform a symbolic role to hide how things really work - providing legitimacy and status to some whilst denying it to others? Perhaps systems actually work because they have imperfections within them, and those imperfections actually hold social systems together? That's a conclusion from many studies of science and technology, and its interesting to think how it might be relevant to the control of animal disease.

Reflections on day 1 of m.bovis 2014

I'm at m.bovis 2014 this week - anninternational scientific conference on bovine tuberculosis. The last conference was 5 years ago in Wellington which I was fortunate to go to. This time it's in Cardiff. Here's my thoughts on what's happened so far: 

- wow, there are a lot of people here!

- the most interesting speakers for me were Brian Radunz and Paul Livingstone. I know Paul very well, and I've heard his talk before. Both though we're preaching from the same hymn sheet: that governance was the key. The message is very seductive if you are a country struggling with eradication. But let's not carried away. Those solutions were possible became possible for particular reasons, and reflect the socio-economic contexts of those countries. The question is to what extent is any of those experiences relevant for other countries?

- during Paul livingstone's talK there were some people (from AHVLA) commenting on what he was saying. Reflecting on NZs possum control, they said "it's great how he's just cutting through all the PC stuff...it's what we need to do". Actually, the point is that it would be 'un-PC' not to cull possums. Disease control tends to run with national cultural attitudes rather than against them: that's how it comes to 'work'.

More on day 2 tomorrow...