The farm ministry on Monday defended itself against allegations by a weekly magazine that it encouraged farmers to feed cattle with meat-and-bone meal in the mid-1990s.
The weekly Shukan Bunshun said in its latest edition that an employee of a livestock laboratory affiliated with the ministry encouraged the use of MBM in a February 1996 article in the journal Dairy Japan.
MBM is a suspected source of mad cow disease, which is thought to cause a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease to develop in humans.