November 13, 2003 Japan Economic Newswire

The ban will apply to the backbones of cattle reared in Japan and from other nations hit with mad cow disease.

The manufacture and sale of extracts or oil derived from cows' backbones, as well as processed foods containing such extracts or oil, will be banned, the members of the special panel on mad cow disease said.

The backbone is deemed likely to be just as infective as the spinal cord in cows with mad cow disease, they said. The use of spinal cord extracts in food has already been banned.

Acting on the panel's recommendation, the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry notified prefectural governments of the ban on Friday. The ban will be enforced from mid-February, but the ministry said it expects local authorities to exercise restraint on the use of cattle backbone even before the regulations are enforced.

The ban will also cover domestic T-bone steak, sales of which had been poor in the first place, the panel said.

The measure is part of the government's stepped-up efforts on mad cow disease, the ninth case of which was confirmed earlier this month in a slaughtered 21-month-old bullock in Hiroshima Prefecture.

There is already a ban in place on imports of food products using such extracts, and T-bone steak, from other nations hit by mad cow disease.

That ban does not apply to such products coming from Australia or the United States, which are among the countries that have not had any reported cases of mad cow disease. The new measure will not be applied to them either.

Mad cow disease was first discovered in 1986 in Britain and has since spread, mostly in Europe.

The panel members said the problem is not the backbone itself, but abnormal prions had been found to accumulate in the ganglion. Prions are protein particles lacking nucleic acid that have been linked to nervous system illnesses such as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is believed to have come from mad cow disease.

According to the panel, the risk of infection from cow backbone is the same as that posed by spinal cord. The government in June ordered that the spinal cords of all slaughtered cattle be removed and incinerated.

Japan's first case of mad cow disease was confirmed in September 2001 in Chiba Prefecture. Since then, Japan has checked all slaughtered cows for the disease before authorizing the meat to be consumed.