April 2, 2004

Japan Refuses To Budge On US Mad Cow Testing

Japan doesn't support a U.S. proposal to set worldwide testing standards for mad cow disease by the end of the month, a Japanese official said Thursday.
 
Washington wants the Paris-based World Organization for Animal Health to set international standards before April 30. The organization collects and distributes data on animal diseases from 166 member nations.
 
But vice agriculture minister, Mamoru Ishihara, said Tokyo won't back the idea.
 
"I don't think that it is appropriate" to involve the World Organization for Animal Health, Ishihara told a news conference, adding: "It's also unrealistic to seek a solution to the issue by the end of this month."
 
Agriculture Minister Yoshiyuki Kamei will convey the decision to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman in the coming days, Ishihara said.
 
Japan has banned American beef imports since the first diseased U.S. cow was discovered in December.
 
Tokyo says it won't allow U.S. beef back into the country until Washington starts testing every slaughtered cow for the brain-wasting bovine illness, a measure Japan introduced after finding its own domestic mad cow case in 2001. Japan has since found 11 cases of mad cow, known formally as bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
 
U.S. officials say scientific evidence doesn't suggest that blanket testing for the disease is required.
 
Ishihara said Japan stands by its demand for blanket testing.
 
The U.S. supplied 30% of beef consumed in Japan before the import ban went into effect.
 
Japanese consumer confidence in beef, shattered after the domestic discovery of mad cow disease, only recovered when the government began testing all cattle for the disease.
 
Eating beef from a diseased cow is thought to cause the fatal human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.