Japan finds mad cow disease- Epidemic reaches Asia at last

TOKYO - Japan's government announced yesterday it has found the country's - and Asia's - first suspected case of mad cow disease and blamed imported feed as the likely cause.

Japanese health experts previously had asserted the high standards of cleanliness in Japanese cattle ranches would keep the country free of the brain-wasting disease, which has ravaged herds in Britain and elsewhere in Europe and is believed linked to a fatal human disease.

But officials were alarmed last month when a cow in Shiroi in Chiba prefecture mysteriously lost the ability to stand. The animal was slaughtered and tests of its brain indicate signs of the illness, according to a statement issued yesterday by the Ministry of Agriculture.

"We must now ask ourselves if our previous way of thinking was wrong, if there were factors we hadn't foreseen," said Kiyoshi Onodera, deputy division chief at the Ministry of Agriculture's animal health division.