Japan suspends beef imports from plant

The Associated Press
Sunday, January 13th 2008, 4:00 AM
TOKYO — Japan suspended beef imports from a U.S. meatpacking plant after recent shipments from the facility contained products that failed to meet Japanese import regulations, officials said Sunday.
Imports from Smithfield Group’s Moyer packing factory in Pennsylvania will be suspended because 1,264 boxes of a recent shipment contained beef from cattle 21 months old, the Agriculture and Health Ministries said in a joint statement issued late Saturday. Japan allows only meat from cows 20 months old or younger.
Two Japanese importers were ordered to recall the products after officials found an estimated 1.4 tons of the 19-ton shipment was meat from cattle 21 months old, the statement said.
The violation stemmed from a computer programming error, the ministries said, citing U.S. investigators’ findings.
The mistake was found by U.S. agriculture officials during a routine inspection, an official of Japan’s Agriculture Ministry told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity, citing government policy.
Washington notified Tokyo of the error Saturday and shipments from the Smithfield plant will be banned until Japan receives a detailed report on the mistake, the statement said.
Japan banned American beef imports in December 2003 after the first case of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, was found in the United States. The ban was eased in July 2006. This was the first instance that U.S. beef violating import regulations could have been sold to Japanese consumers, the ministry official said.
Since the shipment was from young cattle and contained no high-risk parts such as spinal cord, the Japanese government believes the shipment posed few health risks, he added.
Eating meat products with infected tissue is linked to mad cow disease’s rare, fatal variant, Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, which has killed more than 150 people worldwide, most of them in Britain.