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VET Record‘s series of articles on bovine tuberculosis (bTB)1, 2 is timely. Government, the veterinary profession and the farming sector are at a juncture where decisions made in the next few months will shape policy for the next decade or more. It is vital that this process is open and inclusive. It is a little over 100 years since official bTB controls were introduced in Great Britain, and over 50 years since official badger killing was introduced (albeit not continuously) in an attempt to control the infection in cattle. The current strategy for England was introduced in 2014 and aims to achieve officially TB free (OTF) status by 2038. This has incurred substantial public and private expenditure, and has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of cattle and badgers. And yet, no matter which set of the myriad available statistics is examined, one can only conclude that the strategy's objective is a long way out of reach and is, perhaps, simply unattainable. To achieve OTF status, the current incidence would need to be reduced 50-fold and be sustained for at least five years. One only has to compare the epidemic curves of other diseases where eradication or official freedom has been achieved; diseases such as contagious bovine pleuropneumonia, bovine brucellosis and, more recently, foot-and-mouth disease and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). All showed a precipitous and sustained drop in prevalence once effective control measures were introduced. Bovine TB has a more complex epidemiology than the diseases above but that is all the more reason for an effective control policy. We don't doubt that is the government's intention, but unless more effective cattle controls are introduced we will still be testing and slaughtering cattle prematurely in another 100 years. At the very least, the control policy must include more sensitive routine tests and effective cattle movement controls – the goal of declaring parts of England OTF has not been achieved, due in no small part to a failure to control movements from higher-risk parts of the country. Do we need to spend in excess of £100 million annually on a fool's errand when public health is protected, when the impact on farm businesses is profound and so protracted, and when it involves an open-ended war on our wildlife with dire consequences for animal welfare and the wider ecology? Then there's the opportunity cost – if we were serious about public health, then wouldn't the cause be better served by spending £1 billion on a couple of teaching hospitals? “It is time for a detailed policy review that asks the previously unthinkable question – is striving for OTF status absolutely necessary?