Britain's worst outbreak more than 30 years ago devastated a region around the Welsh border but did not spread widely across the country or to Ireland.
The epidemic surfaced on October 21st, 1967, when Norman Ellis noticed two lame sows on his mixed farm outside Oswestry, Shropshire, near the Welsh border. Five days later a veterinary inspector diagnosed foot-and-mouth. The farm's stock was immediately slaughtered and buried.
The town's market, where two of Mr Ellis's cows had been sent, was closed. A few days later, two further outbreaks were confirmed, both close to Mr Ellis's farm. The ministry of agriculture was not worried at this point, a government report later found.
The situation changed dramatically over the next few days, however. On October 30th, there were nine more confirmations, one of which was 100 miles from the Ellis farm. Two weeks later there were 222 outbreaks.
Confirmed cases rose steadily, eventually peaking at the end of November, when 490 outbreaks occurred in one week. A steady decline followed and the last outbreak was confirmed in June 1968. By this time, there had been 2,364 outbreaks and 433,987 animals had been slaughtered. Significantly, almost all of the outbreaks were concentrated in an area around the north Wales border. The ministry's chief veterinary officer concluded the most likely source of infection was frozen imported Argentinian lamb, which might have been supplied to the Ellis farm in October.
Those who remember the crisis recall the smoke from pyres drifting across the countryside, as hundreds of animals were piled up on railway sleepers and burned with coal before being buried in quicklime. The army was called in because local contractors could not cope with the numbers for disposal. Many vets from the Republic went to Britain to help.
Dr Agnes Winter, who worked as a vet during the crisis, said it was a "dreadful experience". She graduated two years before the epidemic and had started a new job in 1967, the week the crisis erupted. She was drafted in as a temporary veterinary inspector in Cheshire, one of the counties severely affected. "It was really raging in November, December and January," says Dr Winter. Most of the affected farms, she says, were "modest family farms with a dairy herd, a few pigs and a few sheep".
In 1967, veterinary inspectors did not wait for laboratory analysis - animals were slaughtered if they showed symptoms of the disease, she says. This was partly because foot-and-mouth was more easily diagnosed in cows than in sheep. And the 1967 outbreak mostly affected cattle - in contrast to the current outbreak, which has been predominant in sheep.
Dr Winter remembers how the epidemic devastated the region economically, with thousands of farmers traumatised for years. "I look back and wonder how they coped." The second time she diagnosed the disease - on a farm which bred pedigree shorthorn cattle - was difficult for her, as she was raised on a similar farm.
The 1967 outbreak moved from farm to farm on the wind and by vehicles. It did not spread to uplands. Cases were heavily concentrated in north Wales and adjoining counties. Infected farms were sealed off. No one was allowed on or off the premises. Police were stationed outside the gates.
Social life stopped in Oswestry. Footpaths were closed. Hunting, shooting, fishing and horse racing were suspended. Car rallying, cross-country running, camping, canoeing, football, gliding and mountaineering were all affected.
The scale of the current outbreak is already far worse than the 1967 epidemic at the same stage, the UK government's chief veterinary officer, Mr Jim Scudamore, has admitted.
In 1967, he said, there was only one centre of the disease. But now there are three large areas from which outbreaks are spreading. Though the number of farms where the disease has been confirmed is fewer than at the same stage of the 1967 crisis, greater numbers are in contact with the disease.
The number of animals condemned for slaughter in the current crisis rose this week to 663,015, more than the 433,987 killed in the eight-month outbreak in 1967/8.
"The pattern of the spread is very different," says Dr Winter. During the current crisis, sheep are spreading the disease more rapidly and over a wider area. This is due to the nature of modern farming, more specialised than it was then.
While there would have been some movement of animals into Britain in 1967, it would be nothing compared with the volume now, says Dr Winter. And movement of animals and people from Britain into Ireland was severely curtailed.
Although he was not in the State at the time, Prof P. J. Quinn of UCD's faculty of veterinary medicine said others had told him of "rigidly enforced" restrictions which were "quite draconian".
Some people, for example, were told not to return to the State for Christmas. The main difference between the 1967 crisis and the one now is the "enormous movement of people, animals and food of animal origin", he warns.