The Consumers’ Foundation today announced its opposition to a plan to expand imports of Japanese beef, saying that bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as “mad cow disease,” remains a risk.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) earlier this week announced plans to revise regulations to allow imports of beef from cattle of any age, scrapping an upper limit of cattle aged 30 months.
When the proposals go into effect depends on the results of consultation with experts, the FDA said, although the new draft guidelines were uploaded to its Web site on Tuesday.
Photo: Chiu Chih-jou, Taipei Times
The FDA would spend 60 days from Tuesday to garner public opinion via the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s online portal, it said.
The Consumers’ Foundation issued a four-point statement announcing its disagreement with the proposal.
Since 2001, there have been more than 10 cases of mad cow disease in Japan, the foundation said.
Given the long time between infection and the onset of symptoms and that the disease usually occurs in cows over five years old, importing beef from cattle of any age poses a risk to humans, it said.
Eating infected beef can lead to a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, it added.
The FDA’s decision to expand imports must be made cautiously and the agency should be transparent about the results of its inspections, the foundation said.
The FDA has not justified why it seeks to change the regulations and the ministry should explain to the public why it has decided to do so to allow people to make informed decisions, the foundation said.
If the decision is related to promoting an economic partnership agreement with Japan, then the ministry is sacrificing public health in return for economic gain, the foundation said.
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