SEOUL - South Korea plans to automatically suspend beef imports from countries that report a new outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow, parliamentary sources said Friday.
The Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries recently outlined an updated action plan to better protect the public from harmful meat, the sources said.
The measure was announced at a recent meeting of the National Assembly's food and agriculture committee, and calls for automatic suspension of all quarantine inspections on beef from countries that report new BSE cases.
Under the measure, the government will convene a livestock quarantine consultation committee to determine the exact health risks in case of a new case of mad cow.
BSE is known to cause the fatal, brain-wasting variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.
"If the risk is deemed serious, an outright ban can be implemented, but the country can opt to restart quarantine inspections if the problem is seen as being minor," the parliamentary insider said.
He said that new plan is an updated version of the livestock epidemic prevention law that has been criticized for being vague.
The law, forged last year after massive protests against U.S. beef imports, authorizes the government to stop imports if an "emergency situation" arises. Lawmakers had not defined what constituted an emergency.
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