Japan has 15th case of mad cow disease
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-02-26 13:09

Japan has confirmed its 15th case of mad cow disease in a cow from the country's north, the government said Saturday.

The 8-year-old Holstein cow was already dead when it was brought in for testing from a ranch in Hobetsu, Hokkaido state earlier this week.

Preliminary tests indicated it had the fatal brain-wasting disease, and more precise tests conducted at a state-run research center near Tokyo confirmed those results, the Agriculture Ministry said in a statement.

Eating beef from a diseased cow is thought to cause the fatal human variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

On Feb. 4, Japan confirmed its first human case of mad cow disease following the death of a man with symptoms of the illness. Japanese health authorities have said it was likely the man contracted the disease while living for a month in Britain — where mad cow first surfaced — in 1989.

Tokyo has checked every slaughtered cow before it enters the food supply since 2001, after its first discovery of mad cow disease, known formally as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE.

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