OVER-SHADOWED by world events, the ending of the horror of the foot and mouth disease outbreak in Lancashire -- now officially at an end as the county has gone four months without a confirmed case -- may have come as an anti-climax.

Nonetheless, the feeling of relief in farms and rural communities will be immense as nine months of nightmare are hopefully over at last.

For most people the protraction of the emergency over so many months will have dulled their awareness of just how great a disaster this was for the countryside as memories fade of the horrendous slaughter of tens of thousands of animals and of their funeral pyres.

But farmers and people living in Lancashire's rural communities will never forget what a catastrophe this was and what hardship had to be endured before this pernicious disease was defeated.

And forgetting the immensity of this epidemic and its impact would be a huge folly. For two important tasks need to be urgently undertaken in its aftermath.

They are learning lessons from it so that such a disaster never recurs and putting British farming and devastated rural business and communities back on their feet.

There are many country folk who believe that the government is grateful for the events of September 11 and the ensuring war against terror for deflecting attention away from its handling of the foot and mouth crisis and its resistance to a public inquiry into the causes and reaction to the outbreak fuels that suspicion.

But, surely, every aspect of this plague needs to be probed -- from whether vaccination is a better curb to the disease than wholesale slaying to whether centralisation of animal slaughter for meat and increased long-distance transport of animals is a danger -- and measures put in place to prevent it in future.

So, too, must firm efforts be made to help farms and rural businesses recover.

Now that it is over, the horror of this epidemic must not be written off as a grim experience, but learned from so that it never happens again.