S. Korea to suspend beef imports from countries with new mad cow cases

SEOUL, Nov. 27 (Yonhap) -- South Korea plans to automatically suspend beef
imports from countries that report a new outbreak of bovine spongiform
encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow, parliamentary sources said
Friday.

The Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries recently outlined an
updated action plan to better protect the public from harmful meat, the sources
said.
The measure was announced at a recent meeting of the National Assembly's food and
agriculture committee, and calls for automatic suspension of all quarantine
inspections on beef from countries that report new BSE cases.
Under the measure, the government will convene a livestock quarantine
consultation committee to determine the exact health risks in case of a new case
of mad cow.
BSE is known to cause the fatal, brain-wasting variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease
in humans.
"If the risk is deemed serious, an outright ban can be implemented, but the
country can opt to restart quarantine inspections if the problem is seen as being
minor," the parliamentary insider said.
He said that new plan is an updated version of the livestock epidemic prevention
law that has been criticized for being vague.
The law, forged last year after massive protests against U.S. beef imports,
authorizes the government to stop imports if an "emergency situation" arises.
Lawmakers had not defined what constituted an emergency.
yonngong@yna.co.kr
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