Team:Exeter/Introduction

TB or not TB

Delving into the problem of Bovine TB in the UK is not something that we as a team took lightly. Bovine TB is a challenging disease that is hard to treat, easily transmitted and currently illegal to vaccinate against. Put these three factors together with the highly complex social, political and economical situation the UK faces with eradicating TB, it is clear that Bovine TB is a National problem that needs a solution.

Extremely early into our project we began to appreciate this. Therefore we agreed that during our project we wanted to make people more aware of the challenges farmers, vets and local communities face when dealing with Bovine TB.

Establishing relationships with various experts early on was extremely important. Not only have these relationships shaped certain areas of our project but also gave us an unprecedented look into the issue of Bovine TB in the UK. In the beginning these experts allowed us to understand everything to do with Bovine TB in the field and as our project has developed we have been able to integrate their experiences, suggestions and feedback into the science we are doing in the lab.

Our Beyond the Bench became as much of a lesson for us as a team as it did have an impact on our Ribonostics project. Vets, farmers, politicians, the NFU and DEFRA are just to name a few of the people/organisations highly involved with our project.