Taiwan is to lift a ban on the importation of Canadian beef from cattle older than 30 months, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said yesterday.
Advance notice of the ban’s revocation was provided on Thursday and allows a 30-day period for public input, although the date on which the ban is to be lifted has yet to be decided, FDA Food Safety Division head Cheng Wei-chih (鄭維智) said.
Canada in February obtained “negligible risk status” for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) from the World Organisation for Animal Health, Cheng said.
Photo: CNA
The FDA decided in a recent meeting with experts to lift the ban following a field inspection and risk assessment, he said.
The move to allow the Canadian imports came after a government source recently said that the ban became a barrier in talks on a proposed bilateral foreign investment promotion and protection agreement between Taipei and Ottawa.
Initial discussions on a possible agreement progressed “very smoothly” until the beef issue arose, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Taiwan in January last year lifted restrictions on the importation of US beef from cattle older than 30 months.
There are two type of BSE: “classic” bovine spongiform encephalopathy (C-BSE) and “atypical” BSE, Linkou Chang Gung Hospital’s Clinical Poison Center head Yen Tsung-hai (顏宗海) said when asked about the safety implications of revoking the ban.
C-BSE occurs in cattle that have consumed contaminated feed and can infect humans, while atypical BSE is congenital, he said.
The FDA seems to have used information provided by Canada that showed the last C-BSE case in the country was reported in 2015, and Taiwan apparently agreed that the BSE risk from Canadian beef is low, Yen said.
However, Yen cited news reports that Canada continued to report C-BSE cases until 2021, so the FDA should have traced the disease in a dynamic manner instead of using the fixed data provided by Canada.
If Canada reports new BSE cases in the future, the risk assessment by the FDA would be invalid, and the risks would need to be reassessed, he said.
Yen said that although there is no evidence that variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, commonly known as “mad cow disease,” is related to C-BSE, from a medical standpoint, the risk exists.
The disease has no cure, and could become a serious public health problem, he added.
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