Prices of high-quality domestic beef recovered slightly Tuesday at Tokyo's central wholesale market, where a beef auction was held for the first time this year.

While demand for beef is generally weak due to lingering fears over mad cow disease, prices of high-quality beef per kilogram rose by between 200 yen and 300 yen compared with levels recorded on Dec. 29, the final trading day of 2001.

This was primarily due to firm demand on the part of wholesalers returning from the New Year's holidays.

One kilogram of benchmark A4 Japanese beef was traded around the 1 yen,700-1,800 yen level, while that of A5 beef, which tops the beef-quality rankings, was bought at around the 2,300 yen level.

Prices were still down, however, by between 10 percent and 20 percent compared to their levels on the first auctioning day in 2001.

At the end of November, the price of A4 beef temporarily fell to 1,155 yen per kg -- about 40 percent lower than the corresponding level in 2000 -- following the discovery of the nation's third case of mad cow disease. This was also the lowest level since September, when the first case of the fatal disease was discovered.

Industry officials said they were not encouraged by the modest recovery in prices at Tuesday's auction.

"It was just due to a drop in inventories at retail stores," one industry official said.

Koji Tezuka, managing director at Tokyo Meat Market Co., said: "Consumer worries have not been completely wiped out. I don't think prices are going to maintain current levels."

Despite the launch in October of a nationwide campaign to screen of cows, and a health ministry declaration that domestic beef is safe to eat, beef continues to be unpopular due to consumer distrust of the handling of the outbreak by the ministry and public health officials.

Mad cow disease originated in Britain and is believed to arise when cows are fed with infected meat-and-bone meal, which contains material from other cows.

Human consumption of infected beef is thought to cause a new variant of the fatal human disorder Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Mad cow disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, has killed more than 100 people in Europe.