EU Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection Mr David Byrne today ruled out a European-wide vaccination programme to prevent the spread of foot-and-mouth.
Such a programme would involve vaccinating 300 million animals every six months.
"It would make it impossible to distinguish between livestock that had been immunised and those that had contracted the disease," Mr Byrne said.
"You would then debilitate the value of your livestock herds throughout the European Union and lose the opportunity of trading on the worldwide market," he said.
Mr Byrne said there was a case for using limited vaccination programmes as a "firewall" to control outbreaks. Some 30 million vaccinations were available.
But the situation in Britain had not reached that stage, he said.
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"The firewall I am talking about would only be appropriate in circumstances where the outbreak is very widespread and it is, as it were, out of control in the sense that you do not know where the particular outbreak is from," he said.
"Vets in the UK are in a position to identify exactly why an outbreak took place."
The movement of animals from unaffected farms to abattoirs was "appropriate" in Britain.
PA