Japan's agriculture ministry on Saturday said that a cow had been confirmed to have been infected with the mad cow disease, the first such case outside Europe.
The infection was confirmed by neuro-pathologists at the Veterinary Laboratories Agency, a British government agency, according to the ministry.
The ministry earlier this month sent the test results to the British agency for confirmation.
The infected cow, a 5-year-old Holstein raised at a dairy farm in Shiroi, Chiba Prefecture, was first detected on August 6 with symptoms of mad cow disease.
Agriculture ministry officials said the government has no idea how the cow became infected.
To prevent the spread of the mad cow disease, the ministry plans to expand areas for banning imports of meat and bone meal ( MBM), but ruled out an immediate ban on the use of the MBM as feed for cows.
The MBM, a protein feed made from the crushed internal organs, skin and bones of cows, has been blamed for the spread of mad-cow disease infection.
Meanwhile, Japan has declared its domestic MBM feed to be safe.
The ministry also plans to conduct intensive examinations on one million cows aged 30 months or older across Japan starting late October.
The Japanese health ministry is also considering strengthening ways of detecting symptoms of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans, noting that the link between the mad cow disease and its human variant cannot be ignored, the sources said.
There are no reports of human patient contracting the variant CJD in Japan.
Mad cow disease was first detected in Britain in 1986. It is thought to cause the fatal human variant CJD.
(People’s Daily 09/23/2001)
