New map shows TB breakdowns in your local area

A new interactive map by UCD shows farmers if there has been a recent TB breakdown in their parish.

Farmers can filter the map by putting in their address to see the number of breakdowns, reactors, animals with lesions and number of tests carried out in 2023.

Commenting on the map, deputy director of the Centre for Veterinary Epidemiology and Risk Analysis (CVERA) at UCD Guy McGrath said that a lot of farmers have been saying they want to know what's happening in relation to TB in their neighbourhood.

“The Department [of Agriculture’s] quarterly maps cover too large an area to convey this detail. Then we have the farm organisations saying that they don’t want farmers’ TB risk to be public knowledge, that it’s unfair on the farmers with TB as it could result in being on the losing end of risk-based trading.

“So, we are stuck between farmers wanting to know what’s going on in their area and not identifying individual farms,” he told the Irish Farmers Journal.

Farmer data

The Department funds this TB research, but doesn't interfere with the scientific process, he said.

“For this project, there is a data sharing agreement where data from farms must be summarised to a minimum of five farms to ensure no individual can be identified.

“To map TB breakdowns, researchers took the centroid or centre of gravity of the largest fragment of land on a farm and completed this for every farm in the country,” he said.

Using an algorithm, they then collapsed this into the shapes visible on the map to ensure every shape contained at least five farms.

“There’s no way if you were at a mart you could fire this up and use it to identify a farm from which you were buying cattle. It couldn’t be used for risk-based trading of cattle.

“We’re doing our very best to protect farmers, but to also give them the knowledge to let them see what’s going on in their area,” he said.

You can use the map by clicking here.