The European Food Safety Authority has raised its assessment of the risk of finding mad cow disease in the USA, Canada and Norway. Officials said the move would affect only Norwegian beef exporters.
Norway's reclassification from "highly unlikely" to "unlikely but not excluded" means its exporters will have to "take out a bit more significant risk material" before shipping beef into the EU, said Beate Gminder, European Commission spokeswoman.
The USA and Canada were both raised from "unlikely" to "likely but not confirmed or confirmed at a lower level." It follows the discovery of a lone case of mad cow disease in Canada's Alberta province and another in Washington state in 2003.
However, Gminder said those reclassifications would not impose any additional requirements on exporters. "In practice, nothing changes," she said. The EU ban on growth-promoting hormones for cattle means it imports very little North American beef anyhow, she said.
