Korean Job Discussion Forums

[sundubuman]

And remind me why Japanese aren't allowed to eat American beef again???



AP) 45 Japan Cows Suspected of Having Mad Cow

TOKYO

Forty-five cows at a farm in northern Japan are suspected of having mad cow disease and will be destroyed, officials said Thursday.

The cows are from a farm on the northern island of Hokkaido where a cow died last month of the disease _ Japan's 22nd mad cow case. Following the death, the Hokkaido government banned the farm from moving any of its more than 400 cows, said Osamu Terada, an official with Hokkaido prefecture.

The dead cow was not raised for food and posed no danger to the country's beef supply, officials said.

The cows to be destroyed include 43 adults and two calves _ the offspring of the cow that died in January, the Hokkaido prefecture said in a statement.

The announcement came a month after Japan halted all imports of U.S. beef following the discovery of backbones in a shipment of American veal. The bones are deemed to be at risk of mad cow disease and are banned under a deal that reopened the Japanese market to U.S. beef in December.

The recent import halt was a harsh turnaround for the U.S. beef business in Japan. Tokyo banned American beef in December 2003 after the first U.S. case of mad cow disease, and lifted the embargo only in December of last year.

Hokkaido official Hiroyuki Takeuchi said authorities are treating the 45 cows as suspected disease carriers under Japanese government guidelines on handling infected cattle. The guidelines call for any cattle given the same feed and raised in the same pen for the first year of life with a cow that tests positive to be destroyed as an infected animal, he said.

Calves born within two years of the discovery of mad cow among their herd are also treated as suspected infection cases, he said.

Prefectural officials will test the cattle Friday after they are destroyed to determine if they indeed had the disease, local official Shizuo Matsuoka said. Results could be available as early as Monday.

The dead Hokkaido cow was fed with meat-and-bone meal _ the first known use of such feed in Japan since it was banned in 2001, Terada said. The case also marks the first time the feed's use has been linked to a mad cow-infected animal in Japan, he said.

Officials are investigating how the meal came to be used for the cow, which died on Jan. 20, he said.

After confirming its first case of mad cow disease in 2001, Japan began testing every domestically slaughtered cow entering the market and banned the use of meat-and-bone meal made from ruminant animal parts because of the possibility they could transmit the disease.

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is a brain-wasting disease in cattle, which in humans can cause a variant form, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. The disease has killed more than 150 people, mostly in Britain, where there was an outbreak in the 1990s.

[VanIslander]

I just realized that I've never seen a very fat Japanese woman.



Do they even exist?

[Wrench]