Japan has lifted an import suspension on a U.S. meat processing company after it vowed new measures to prevent it from breaking a bilateral accord on managing mad cow disease risk in beef shipments, the farm and health ministries said Friday.
In February 2011, the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry and the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry suspended beef imports from Greater Omaha Packing Co. in Nebraska because the Animal Quarantine Service could not verify if the large intestines in one of the company's shipments were taken, as required, from cattle aged 20 months or younger.
A report presented to the Japanese government by the U.S. Department of Agriculture on March 15 blamed the problem on plant workers failing to perform the inspections needed to prevent shipments for the U.S. market from being mixed up with shipments destined for Japan, the ministries said.
The report said that Greater Omaha Packing will take steps to prevent the problem from recurring, such as by attaching identification labels to each box bound for Japan.
The large intestines, which weighed 760 kg, were among 2.1 tons of frozen beef delivered.
Mad cow disease, which causes the brain to degenerate, is formally known as bovine spongicord encephalopathy, or BSE. The human form is called new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or vCJD.