The foot-and-mouth crisis would have been over much sooner if the Government had introduced a mass slaughter policy earlier, new research has claimed.

Introducing an immediate cull and imposing tight movement restrictions from day one of the epidemic would have limited the spread of the disease, says the report.

The research by three British universities concludes that a mass cull was the best way of handling the crisis and that vaccination would have had a limited effect.

There have been more than 2,000 confirmed cases of foot-and-mouth including 93 in County Durham, five in Teesside, six in Tyneside, and 134 in North Yorshire, since the outbreak began in February.

Professor Mark Woolhouse, from the University of Edinburgh's Centre for Tropical Medicine, said: ''Our analysis confirms that the culling policy introduced in late March was essential to bring the disease under control."

Researchers from the universities of Edinburgh, Cambridge and Guelph in Canada have been studying the epidemic and the measures used to fight it.

They constructed a detailed model of the epidemic using the location of every farm in Britain, as well as the type and number of livestock, to estimate the regional risk of transmission of the disease.

Their research is due to be published today in the journal Science.

Read more about foot-and-mouth here.