July 6, 2004

Japan To Continue Blanket Test For Mad Cow Disease
 
Japan is to continue carrying out blanket testing for mad cow disease for the time being, even though the government admitted last week that the approach has some technical limitations, a senior farm ministry official said, according to a Kyodo news agency report Monday.
 
Mamoru Ishihara, vice minister of agriculture, forestry and fisheries, added that stopping the testing just because of these limitations would be problematic.
 
During the three-day talks with the U.S. in Colorado, Japan acknowledged for the first time that blanket screening has shortcomings when it comes to detecting whether young cows have been infected with the brain-wasting disease, something that the U.S. has contended all along, Kyodo said.
 
However, Ishihara said Japan will not immediately change its current policy of testing all slaughtered cattle, saying there is as yet no established theory for detecting the disease.
 
"There is not enough scientific data on BSE," Ishihara told a news conference, adding that Japan's stance is to deal with the issue carefully, according to the report.
 
He also said it is possible that blanket testing might become more important in the future. Japan has been conducting blanket testing since the country's first outbreak of the disease in 2001.
 
Japan and the U.S. have been at odds over a system for detecting BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Japan has called for blanket testing as a precondition for reopening its market to U.S. beef, while the U.S. has rejected the demand, saying it has no scientific basis, Kyodo reported.
 
Japan was the largest importer of U.S. beef until it imposed an import ban after the outbreak of the disease in the U.S. last December, Kyodo said.
 
Experts have argued that it is impossible to detect whether young cows have been infected with the disease, given that their brains can only collect a small amount of abnormal prions, the proteins that make up the infectious agents widely believed to cause BSE, the report said.
 
The three-day meeting of experts and government officials from the two countries that ended Wednesday was the second of its kind following one held in Tokyo in May.
 
Japan and the U.S. are expected to come up with a report after another working-level meeting in Tokyo in late July and try and reach a final conclusion on whether Japan will reopen its market to American beef at high-level talks expected in August, the Kyodo report said.