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First Suspected Mad Cow Case Found in Japan, More Expected by Scientists
A cow suspected of having mad cow disease has been found in Shiroi, Chiba Prefecture, east of Tokyo, Kyodo News reported Monday.
It is the first suspected case of the disease in Japan, according to Japan's Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry.
The cow, a 5-year-old female Holstein dairy cow which a dairy farmer had been breeding, has been destroyed, the report said.
The health ministry said it is most likely that the cow was infected through the animal-based feed it ate.
The ministry said it will investigate the distribution of meat from cows bred at the same farm as the cow suspected of having mad cow disease and other cows bred using the same animal-based feed.
Sales of such meat will be canceled until the results of the investigation come out, the health ministry said.
Japan's National Institute of Animal Health under the Agriculture Ministry in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, discovered that the cow might have the disease after it was put down.
The Agriculture Ministry and Chiba prefectural government have set up headquarters to deal with the issue, ministry and prefectural government officials said.
Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), was first confirmed in Britain in 1986. The disease is thought to cause variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), the fatal human equivalent of BSE.
In a report compiled earlier this year, the European Union (EU) said there is a possibility that mad cow disease might be found in Japan, but the Japanese Agriculture Ministry criticized the findings, saying there is "a high level of safety in Japan."
Japan to Find More Mad Cow Cases: British Scientist Japan's discovery of mad cow disease in a dairy cow will be the first of many cases in its national herd, and should be a warning to countries across the world, a British scientist said on Monday.
A Reuters report said Dr. Stephen Dealler, a microbiologist who has worked on mad cow disease since 1988, had acknowledged that Japan's first case, confirmed by officials earlier on Monday, may not lead to a British-style epidemic but would linger for months as more cows were tested.
"The first case in Japan is not that surprising...Those countries which feed cows on cheap artificial food rather than grass, they will be the ones to get mad cow disease -- places like Japan," the Reuters report quoted Dealler as saying.
"By the time you see your first case, you've already spread the disease quite a long way...By the time you've seen your first one, you are going to see a lot more," Dealler said.
He said exports of potentially risky feed from Britain could be behind the case, a repeat of the process believed to have spread mad cow disease from British herds to other European countries.
British officials first uncovered BSE in 1986 and then linked the disease a decade later to the human form, which has killed around 100 people in Britain.
Japan imported 132,000 kilograms of animal feedstuffs including meat-and-bone meal at the peak of the British mad cow crisis in 1990, much less than other countries in Asia, including Indonesia, Thailand, the Reuters report said.
Dealler said it was difficult to say whether mad cow disease could reach epidemic proportions in Japan or in Asia.
Japanese officials had announced on Monday that they believe they had found the first case of an animal infected with mad cow disease.
The suspected BSE-infected cow was found in Chiba state, bordering Tokyo, a BBC report said.
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