Inspectors will soon visit U.S. slaughterhouses to check meat safety at the source following the latest incidence of mad cow disease, the ROC Council of Agriculture said April 29.
The U.S. is keeping Taiwan fully informed about the case. In a letter to the COA dated April 27, Tom Vilsack, U.S. secretary of agriculture, said the California case has been controlled and no contaminated meat has entered the market.
The carcass of the diseased animal is now stored in a rendering facility and ready to be disposed of, he said. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration are preparing a thorough investigation of the case, and Taiwan will be notified of the results upon its completion, he added.
The latest case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy surfaced April 24 when a dairy cow became the fourth confirmed U.S. case since 2003. BSE is believed to be the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, a fatal brain disorder.
The council will continue to monitor the BSE risk level assigned to the U.S. by the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), as policies concerning the import of U.S. beef will be reconsidered should it downgrade the nation’s classification from “controlled” to “undetermined.”
"Officials from the COA and Department of Health will visit the U.S. as soon as possible for an annual inspection of their food processing standards,” the council said in a statement, citing a 2009 protocol signed by the ROC representative office in the U.S. and the American Institute in Taiwan.
Taiwan, among many other countries including Japan and South Korea, suspended U.S. beef imports in late 2003 following a case of BSE in that country, but allowed boneless beef in 2006.
There have been 278 confirmed cases of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease in Taiwan over the past three decades, with only one death in 2010 suspected from the illness, DOH sources said. (THN)
Write to Kwangyin Liu at kwangyin.liu@mail.gio.gov.tw