By Maneka Sanjay Gandhi
We select one disease to be mortally afraid of and ignore all the diseases that we should be scared of. One of these is bovine tuberculosis.
Bovine tuberculosis (bTB) is a disease of cattle that is a major public health threat. It is transmitted within herds by inhalation of infected aerosol droplets from infected cattle.
Despite the considerable economic costs, and zoonotic risk, India still does not have any accurate estimates. No surveillance, no checking systems and absolutely no national disease control programmes. Not even education of farmers. In fact, India has the poorest veterinary system in the world. It is one of the few countries left where the disease is considered endemic.
A metastudy, which included 44 different research articles, called Prevalence of Bovine Tuberculosis in India: A systematic review and meta‐analysis reveals that there are about 21.8 million infected cows and buffaloes in India, more than the total number of dairy cows in the USA.
Bovine tuberculosis (bTB) is caused by a bacterium called Mycobacterium bovis. While it mainly affects cattle, the bacteria affects a large number of species, and it has been estimated that M. bovis causes 10 per cent or more of the total human TB cases in India. To remove tuberculosis from humans will require removing bTB from cattle simultaneously.
A government survey done in 2018 showed 2.690 million cases of tuberculosis, 199 people per lakh in India. Mortality is 32 people per lakh – a million times more than the “pandemic” corona virus. Much, much, worse is the fact that India has the largest burden of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis among all countries, with almost 150,000 cases every year.
Much of this is from drinking milk, eating milk products and eating beef. The bacterium, Mycobacterium bovis, survives 1-8 weeks in cattle faeces, so anyone handling gobar is at risk too.
Pasteurisation kills the bacteria but is your milk pasteurised? Forget the consumer, when the dairy owner is physically taking out the milk from the animal, he stands a strong risk of getting bTB . When we surveyed the Idgah slaughterhouse, which I shut down 30 years ago, most of the butchers had bTB, getting it from the infected meat. It is as prevalent today among dairy workers and butchers. Their spit and perspiration on the meat gives it to you.
Do you know where your milk came from? If you were to get bTB today would the government know where to trace the milk back to?
Before pasteurisation was made compulsory in western countries a century ago, M. bovis accounted for 25 per cent of all TB cases in children (Roswurm& Ranney, 1973). But it is not compulsory in India. So, how many lakh Indian children have it? All studies say that the disease is going to increase in the coming years due to the growing intensification of dairy and cattle grown for export. For instance, cattle herds in Puri, Odisha, have increased in bTB from 9.1 per cent to 84.7 per cent (Dhanda and Lall).
We have 300 million cows and buffaloes, the largest population of cattle in the world (Basic Animal Husbandry and Fisheries Statistics, Government of India, 2017). We have the largest beef export. Therefore, we have the potential to infect the whole world with bTB.
Crossbred cows had marginally the highest prevalence, and cows had marginally more than buffaloes. Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Gujarat and Bihar have the highest number of diseased cattle.
Animals are more likely to be infected by M. bovis when they are poorly nourished or under stress.
What are the symptoms in cattle ? In the early stages of TB, clinical signs are not visible. In the later stages, clinical signs may include sluggishness, emaciation, lethargy, weakness, anorexia, low-grade fever, and pneumonia with a soft chronic, moist cough and a chestwheeze. The lymph nodes may be enlarged. If the animal is killed for its meat in an early stage of TB, the microscopic lesions will be missed – that is, if someone is looking. No slaughterhouses in India have even the most basic TB skin test.
Cattle need to be isolated and treated with a combination of antibiotics for 6-12 months. But who will do this ? In the unlikely event that the cattle are tested for bTB, which dairyman will spend money on their treatment? It is too expensive and too long.
In India meat is sold from unregistered filthy shops. Here is a report from England: “Tens of thousands of diseased cattle, slaughtered after testing positive for bovine tuberculosis (bTB), are being sold for human consumption by Defra, the food and farming ministry,” reported The Sunday Times in 2013. Following an investigation, the paper says, it found that the meat is being sold to caterers and food processors by the government’s Food and Agriculture Department, despite being banned by most supermarkets and burger chains.
The BCG vaccine, invented in the 1920s by Calmette and Guerin, had proved to be ineffective. It reduces the severity of the disease but does not prevent infection. Cattle that are vaccinated with the BCG vaccine, which contains a harmless strain of the bovine TB pathogen Mycobacterium bovis, make it impossible to distinguish, with the skin test, if the animal has TB or has simply been vaccinated. The vaccine is banned in most countries.
The study recommends a national surveillance programme using a single, well‐standardised skin test performed by independent, well trained operators using approved protocols and well‐standardized tuberculin antigen.
Is the government going to do this? No. So human tuberculosis in India will not slow down in spite of our signing the World Health Assembly protocol in May 2014 to end the global TB epidemic by 2035. Any attempt to eradicate the disease from humans without eradicating it from cattle is futile.
You need to protect yourself. Don’t drink milk or any dairy based product and don’t eat meat.
(To join the animal welfare movement contact
[email protected], www.peopleforanimalsindia.org)