Three high-flying A-level students have won top place in a national science contest.

The group, Nazia Shah, Aysha Mayat and Vasim Ghafoor, who all study at Keighley College, beat off stiff competition to win top place in the competition, sponsored by international science and healthcare company Bayer plc.

Although none of them are from farming backgrounds and none are country dwellers, they picked the foot and mouth crisis as their study theme.

Their prize is an all expenses paid trip to Bayer's global headquarters in Leverkusen, Germany, where they will see first hand how scientists put ideas into practice. They also picked up £500 for the college plus a Palm Pilot hand-held computer each.

The prizes were presented at the college last Friday by Steve Painter, head of corporate communications at Bayer.

Jim Wilson, Keighley College science teacher and project mentor, said the students quizzed farmer David Airey on how he had been affected by the foot and mouth crisis.

Although his farm was not infected, his business suffered from the many restrictions put in place to contain it.

Mr Wilson said: "He was really smashing with our students. It was lambing time but he showed them his farm and what the problems were."

The Keighley project, which took the form of a documentary film partly shot at Mr Airey's farm, narrowly beat its nearest rival by just 16 votes to pick up a total of 8,423 points.

For the project, each Keighley student prepared a report on one aspect of the foot and mouth epidemic, which hit the local community particularly hard last year.

Scientific research data was collated from a variety of sources and some useful conclusions were drawn from their findings.

Mohammed Variava mastered new editing software to create the finished film. Mr Painter said: "They really got to the core of the foot and mouth epidemic and used the facts to present a well thought through and first-class entry."