The British government has said it must decide within 48 hours whether to vaccinate cattle in Cumbria as part of its strategy to tackle the foot-and-mouth outbreak.
After the Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, met farmers' representatives at Downing Street yesterday, the president of the National Farmers Union, Mr Ben Gill, said vaccination was "not the solution in itself" and animals would still need to be slaughtered.
As Mr Gill warned that blanket vaccination was a "secondary option compared to a clean cull", Downing Street acknowledged that a decision on the use of a vaccine, which would be limited to cattle in Cumbria, would have to be made by the weekend.
The number of confirmed cases in the UK rose to 765 yesterday but Mr Gill said there were some encouraging signs that government policies were starting to keep pace with the outbreak.
The Ministry of Agriculture said it was "investigating reports" from the US that a new diagnostic test for foot-and-mouth was being tested in Britain. An administrator with the US Department of Agriculture told the Senate's agriculture, nutrition and forestry committee on Tuesday his organisation was developing a test which could determine foot-and-mouth in livestock within 40 minutes.
In a separate development, the publishing chief turned organic farmer, Mr Peter Kindersley, has won permission to seek a judicial review of the policy of slaughtering healthy animals to combat foot-and-mouth disease. Mr Justice Richards in the High Court in London ruled that Mr Kindersley, who owns a 2,500acre sheep farm in Berkshire, and two other farmers, had an "arguable case". Mr Kindersley's lawyers said the Ministry of Agriculture's pre-emptive cull policy was unlawful under domestic and European law.
The number of farms in the Netherlands with confirmed cases of foot-and-mouth rose to 10 yesterday, with three new farms in Gelderland infected, an agriculture ministry spokeswoman said.