The role of wildlife in Mycobacterium bovis infection of livestock in New Zealand

Tuberculosis control programmes directed at farmed livestock are complicated by the natural occurrence of the disease in wildlife species in New Zealand. A steadily increasing incidence of infected herds during the 1980s led to a centrally organised research programme to investigate key issues and to test the many popular but largely anecdote-based hypotheses about tuberculosis in wildlife prevalent at the time. The resulting research effort has clarified many aspects of the role of wildlife, the nature of the disease in individual species, and their interaction with livestock. The epidemiology of Mycobacterium bovis in wildlife has been extensively reviewed (Morris et al 1994; Morris and Pfeiffer 1995; Clifton-Hadley et al 2000; Coleman and Cooke 2001; de Lisle et al 2001). This paper examines evidence for the part that wildlife hosts of M. bovis play in maintaining New Zealand’s endemic status, and briefly summarises new opportunities for control designed to reduce transmission probabilities for wildlife and livestock. © 2002 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.