A senior British government adviser on the countryside yesterday called for a pilot vaccination scheme to prevent the further spread of foot-and-mouth during the current outbreak in Northumberland.
The chairman of the Countryside Agency, Mr Ewen Cameron, was speaking at the launch of his organisation's report on the impact of foot-and-mouth on rural life, which put the cost of the crisis to the entire economy at about £4 billion sterling this year.
The report said the economy had suffered more as a result of the downturn in tourism than the restrictions placed on farming during the main outbreak earlier this year.
Mr Cameron said he would like to see a vaccination policy "tested" during the outbreak, which has seen 13 new cases in Northumberland in the past week, because the public would not tolerate another mass slaughter of livestock to prevent the spread of the disease.
Scientific opinion about the effectiveness of vaccination is divided and the British government resisted calls from some farmers to use it as an alternative to slaughter at the height of the crisis.
The Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) said it was "keeping the discussion open" on vaccination and the National Farmers' Union (NFU) said that while all measures should be considered there was no clear scientific advice recommending the use of vaccination.
A spokesman for the NFU said: "The scale of the current foot-and-mouth outbreak raises fundamental questions about possible control strategies in future and we agree that we do need to look at alternatives. But we would have to say, at this stage, that we can see no reason, particularly in the middle of a major disease outbreak, to implement vaccination for vaccination's sake as some sort of experiment to `test' it as a policy."
As seven farms in Scotland close to the border with England remained under strict controls to prevent the spread of the disease from Northumberland, the Countryside Agency said the government had acted quickly to deal with short-term problems affecting the rural economy.
However, officials were warned they had to implement long-term solutions to deal with rural unemployment and tourism which had suffered the heaviest losses as result of the foot-and-mouth outbreak.
It also emerged yesterday that the British army is on standby to join DEFRA officials dealing with the outbreak in Northumberland. The army could be called in if the number of cases reached five a day.