Today’s Taipei Times has this brief news item.

Two people were caught last Wednesday at the CKS International Airport trying to bring in beef from Japan, despite a ban on its import, the Taipei Customs Offices said yesterday. Japan is the only Asian victim of mad cow disease and has reported 20 cases since September 2001. The government has banned the import of Japanese beef since 2001. Inspectors seized nearly 20kg of frozen beef from the luggage of the two passengers, including a Taiwanese and a Japanese, when they arrived from Tokyo aboard a China Airlines flight. The smuggled beef was shipped to a quarantine center in Hsinchu where it will be destroyed.

It’s almost funny that Japan, which has had 20 confirmed cases of mad cow disease, has banned beef from the US, which has had no cases of human transmission in that same time period.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 13th, 2005 at 11:17 am and is filed under Current Events, Econ & Business, Food, Japan, Taiwan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.