Department of Health (DOH) Minister Hou Sheng-mou (
Hou, who is currently on a visit in the US, said the public's health is the government's priority.
His remarks came after the US Department of Agriculture announced on Wednesday that samples from a cow in the US suspected of having bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) , or mad cow disease, had tested negative for the ailment.
Hou called the announcement "good news."
Testing by the agriculture department's National Veterinary Services Laboratories (NVSL) in Ames, Iowa, and the Veterinary Laboratories Agency in Weybridge, England, came back negative, said John Clifford, the department's chief veterinarian.
Additional testing had been ordered after initial results indicated the disease may have been present in the cow. The cow died in April, but the veterinarian forgot to send in the sample until last month.
"Our enhanced surveillance program is designed to provide information about the level of prevalence of BSE in the United States, which by any measure is extremely low," the agriculture department was quoted as saying in a press statement released by the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) yesterday.
Taiwan is the sixth-largest market for US beef, and US$325 million in beef was sold in 2003.
The first case of mad-cow disease in the US was confirmed in Washington State on Dec. 24, 2003 and Taiwan banned imports of US beef, live cattle and all related products a week later.
On April 16, the government began to allow imports of US boneless beef from animals under 30 months of age. But after a second case of BSE was confirmed in Texas in mid-June, Taiwan health officials reimposed the ban on US beef imports.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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