Thomas Mott Osborne: “yesterday a subcommittee of the Japanese Food Safety Commission, on Prions, which deals primarily with BSE, or mad cow…”

“yesterday a subcommittee of the Japanese Food Safety Commission, on Prions, which deals primarily with BSE, or mad cow disease, voted to pursue a course designed to open Japan's borders to U.S. beef. This is something that the beef industry has been waiting for for about 1 year, 1\1/2\ years now. And the full committee will vote tomorrow on opening trade with the United States, and then this will begin a 4-week comment period, after which it is assumed that borders will open. So we are hoping that by the end of the year we will see U.S. beef going to Japan. This is certainly important for our beef industry because Japan was buying at one time roughly $1.7 billion of U.S. beef annually. So it is a huge portion of our beef trade. Getting the border open has been surprisingly difficult, however. We had two cases of BSE in North America that shut off trade with Japan. Japan has had numerous cases of BSE in recent years. Our current testing system would detect one BSE-positive cow out of 10 million healthy cows with a 99 percent probability. So the odds of a BSE cow getting through our present system is practically nil. So it is a very reliable system. Contrast this with the scenario currently going on with the European Union. In 2004, last year, there were 756 cases of BSE in the European Union, 756, whereas in all of North America there have been no more than four or five cases in the last 3 years.…”