The OIE, an international standards body for animal health and diseases, last month introduced a three-tiered system for assessing the risk of BSE in cattle in different countries. Although BSE has never been reported in Taiwan, it has been grouped with countries such as the US and Canada in the "controlled risk" category.

Only five countries have been granted "negligible risk" status: Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Uruguay and Singapore.

One of the reasons why Taiwan did not qualify for "negligible risk" status was that it had imported bonemeal from the US as animal feed until 2003, when BSE was discovered in the US, said Chiang Hsien-choung, head of the Animal health inspection group at the COA's Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine.

"The OIE stipulates that countries can only be classified as having a `negligible risk' if they have not imported bonemeal from BSE-outbreak areas for the past seven years, but how could we have predicted the outbreak in the United States in advance?" Chiang said.

Source: Taipei Times