Japan News Online

Food safety panel head says stricter inspection of U.S. beef needed

When Japan lifts its import ban on U.S. beef, it should limit beef imports to those from U.S. slaughterhouses that have been inspected by the Japanese government, the head of a government panel looking into beef safety said in a recent interview with Kyodo News. The Japanese government should conduct stricter inspections on such facilities than before as a condition for lifting the ban, said Yasuhiro Yoshikawa, a professor at the University of Tokyo who heads the beef safety task force under the Cabinet Office's Food Safety Commission.

Gov't to pay for autopsies in suspected Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease cases

The health ministry plans to provide 250,000 yen to subsidize each autopsy of a person suspected to have died from sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease to confirm whether they died from that or variant CJD, which is linked to mad cow disease, ministry officials said Saturday. The subsidy will be covered by a concerned prefecture as well as the central government starting in April.

U.S. economic growth at real 1.1% in 4th qtr, 3.5% in 2005

The U.S. economy grew an annualized real 1.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2005, down from 4.1 percent registered in the previous quarter, the Commerce Department said in a preliminary report Friday. The fourth quarter growth rate in inflation-adjusted gross domestic product fell short of a market consensus of about 2.8 percent.