Tokyo — Government experts have confirmed Japan's eighth case of mad-cow disease, the Health Ministry announced Monday, underlining concerns about how widespread the illness may be in the country.
The finding comes nearly nine months after the last mad-cow disease diagnosis in January.
In the latest case, a steer tested positive for signs of the disease Sept. 29, when it was brought to a slaughterhouse in Ibaraki prefecture just north of Tokyo. Those findings were backed by follow-up tests by the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Health Ministry official Makoto Kanie said.
A Health Ministry panel on mad-cow disease issued a final ruling on the diagnosis Monday evening, saying experts had determined that the animal was infected after analyzing the test results, ministry spokesman Yohei Takashima said.
Japan was the first country to find an infected animal outside Europe, where the illness devastated cattle farms. Tokyo has since banned the use of meat-and-bone meal in cattle feed.
Last May, Japan was among 30 countries to ban imports of Canadian beef after a single case of mad cow was discovered in Alberta. Japan has yet to lift its ban on Canadian beef and last month demanded that Canada step up its screening procedures for the brain-wasting disease.
Public pressure forced Japan to begin testing for BSE in all cattle meant for human consumption. Officials there have said Canada should do the same — a demand that's been perceived as being excessive.
The disease, known formally as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is thought to cause the fatal human variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Officials warned that the new case should be dealt with cautiously, as it does not fit the pattern of previous infections and raises questions about how the cow was infected, Mr. Takashima said.
The 23-month-old male is the youngest animal to be found in Japan with the disease. The other infected cattle, the first of which was diagnosed in September, 2001, were five years old, Mr. Kanie said.
Last month, an Agriculture Ministry report traced the earlier Japanese outbreak to either Italian cattle feed or British cows but was still unsure how the disease spread to domestic herds.
It said two meal-using Japanese feed plants, one near Tokyo and the other on the northern island of Hokkaido, may not have properly cleaned their machinery between runs, allowing prions — the abnormal proteins that can trigger the disease — to contaminate cattle feed.
If that was the cause, Japan could 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 to have been safely disposed of or flagged by a national inspection system before they could end up on the market.
Hundreds of Japanese public elementary and junior high schools with student lunch programs are still refusing to use beef because of mad-cow worries, a government survey found last month. The study found that 703 schools (about 4.3 per cent) nationwide still banned beef.
