Japan will soon toughen a food law to require that all imported beef be certified as free of mad cow disease, virtually precluding beef imports from European countries faced with the disease.
Chikara Sakaguchi, health, labor and welfare minister, said Friday that the regulation, under the Food Sanitation Law, will be revised, probably on Thursday, to ban imports of beef, as well as of cattle organs and bones, unless the exporting countries present the certificates.
The revision will lead to an effective freeze on European beef, as it is now difficult to prove its safety, ministry officials said.
The ministry has already told food and trading companies to refrain from importing these products from the European Union, Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
"We cannot very well wait until scientific studies can establish the possible risks of human infection from these products," Sakaguchi said.
Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is suspected of causing variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the fatal human equivalent of BSE. Some 80 Europeans have died of new variant CJD since the mid-1990s, and beef sales have plummeted in Europe.