The feed is suspected of spreading mad cow disease.

In a move to protect the country’s livestock, which are so far free from the fatal brainwasting ailment, the ministry and foreign trade and quarantine authorities jointly issued a notice on Saturday prohibiting the EU-produced meat-and-bone meal from being sold to China.

The ban, which takes effect today, follows a recent EU decision to ban the use of ground-up animal carcasses in all livestock feed in response to the latest mad cow disease crisis sweeping Europe, Yang Zhenhai, a division director of the ministry’s Animal Husbandry Bureau, said yesterday.

The notice urged exit-entry inspection and quarantine departments nationwide to tighten their scrutiny of meat-and-bone meal imports and their scrutiny of ground-up animal parts used as a protein supplement in animal feed.

No such products will be allowed into China if exporters fail to register and obtain permits from the Ministry of Agriculture, or if they have no official quarantine certificates from the source countries, according to the notice.

Anyone that is already using or selling such products produced in any of the EU member states must immediately stop using them and then destroy them, the notice said.

There were no details on the amount of meat-and-bone meal from the EU that has already been used in China.

But Zhao Weining, director of the ministry’s Animal Quarantine Management Division, yesterday confirmed there were no known cases of mad cow disease in the country’s livestock so far.

(China Daily 01/01/2001)