- TOKYO (AP) -- Japan has detected
a possible eighth case of mad cow disease, the Health Ministry said today,
underlining concerns about how widespread the illness might be in Japan.
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- The finding, still to be confirmed as an actual case,
comes nearly nine months after the last mad cow diagnosis in January.
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- The latest animal tested positive for signs of the disease
on Sept. 29 when it was brought to a slaughterhouse in Ibaraki prefecture
(state) just north of Tokyo, Health Ministry official Makoto Kanie said.
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- Follow-up tests by the National Institute of Infectious
Diseases backed the initial findings. A Health Ministry mad cow panel was
to meet this evening and issue a final ruling on the diagnosis, Kanie said.
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- If confirmed, the 23-month-old bull would be the youngest
in Japan to carry the brain-wasting disease. The other infected cattle,
the first of which was detected in September 2001, were five years old,
Kanie said.
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- Last month, an Agriculture Ministry report traced the
Japanese outbreak of two years ago to either Italian cattle feed or British
cows, but was still unsure exactly how the disease spread to domestic herds.
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- It said two Japanese plants that make feed from meal
- one near Tokyo, the other on the northernmost main island of Hokkaido
- may not have properly cleaned their machinery between runs, allowing
prions, the abnormal proteins that can trigger the brain-wasting disease,
to contaminate cattle feed.
-
- If that was the cause, Japan would have had 30 more cases
of mad cow disease, according to the panel's simulated worst-case scenario.
But the panel concluded that those cows were likely safely disposed of
or flagged by a national inspection system before they could end up on
the market.
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- Japan was the first country to find an infected cow outside
of Europe, where the illness devastated cattle farms. Tokyo has since banned
the use of meat-and-bone meal in cattle feed.
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- The bovine illness - known formally as bovine spongiform
encephalopathy - is thought to cause the fatal human variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease.
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- Hundreds of Japan's public elementary and junior high
schools with student lunch programs are still refusing to use beef because
of worries about mad cow disease, according to a government survey last
month. The study found that 703 schools, or about 4.3 per cent nationwide,
still banned beef in meals.
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- Copyright 2003 News Limited.
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- http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,7476396%255E1702,00.html
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