Beavers posing a health risk? Sounds like DEFRA are grasping at straws to come up with a plausible reason to remove these native animals from the wild. Judging by the comments on this article it sounds like the general public are not falling for this either. As the piece discusses, there are far worse threats to human health than a few wild beavers and there is no evidence of the larger free-living beaver population in Scotland transmitting disease to humans.

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Officials at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) have repeatedly said that the beavers, thought to be the first in the wild in England for centuries, could threaten human health because they may be carrying a disease that the UK is currently free of.
But Defra documents and emails, released under Freedom of Information rules, reveal that while Public Health England (PHE) is concerned about the disease, it does not believe the beavers would increase the risk to human health from the tapeworm, Echinococcus multilocularis (EM).