By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter

The government will increase the number of quarantine inspections on domestically raised cattle in line with the resumption of the U.S. beef import this week, officials said Wednesday.

Quarantine authorities said they are planning to increase the budget and the number of inspectors for the detection of bovine spongiform encephalopathy ― commonly known as mad cow disease ― at local slaughterhouses. The goal is to obtain enough test cases for the application of a safety assessment from the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) this year.

The new policy is expected to reduce criticism on South Korea's relatively lax quarantine process for domestic cattle. Many local and foreign media and politicians have pointed out that anti-U.S. beef protestors are turning a blind eye to the questionable sanitary conditions Korean cows are raised in.

``We are having internal discussions to expand our quarantine team,'' said Lee Byung-gwon, public relations official at the National Veterinary Research & Quarantine Service. ``We have been carefully monitoring domestic cattle and we believe we did good enough for the health of the people. But limited budget and workforce have constrained us,'' he said.

Lee expected that the Ministry of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries will include the plan as an extra clause when it announces the resumption of U.S. beef import quarantine as early as today.

South Korea has not submitted the full materials needed for BSE risk assessment and therefore is categorized as having ``undetermined risk'' by OIE. The United States has earned ``controlled risk'' status last year.

There has been no reported case of mad cow disease in South Korea, while recently there were two in the United States, one in 2006 and the other in 2005. Critics have said that the disease might have gone undetected in Korea for years because so few domestic cows are inspectioned. The same suspicion is rife for U.S. cattle as well.

According to the food ministry, the national quarantine service inspected 24,172 cows between 2001 and 2007 and earned 96,537 points out of the process ― 0.01 point is earned when inspecting a healthy cow, and up to 750 points are added for a sick cow. The requirement for the OIE application is 240,000 points, which means that quarantine officials will concentrate on high-point sick cows from now on.

``We have long prepared for the strengthening of the safety inspection process. We are just hurrying it up a little bit, because the issue is drawing too much attention these days,'' said Kang Dae-jin, the ministry official in charge of the cattle quarantine.

In addition, Kang said that feeding any animal protein to cattle will be prohibited from this fall, with an exception of fish protein. The mad cow disease is believed to be caused by cattle being fed meat and bones of other cattle. The Korea government banned the feeding of cow remains to cows since 1996.

indizio@koreatimes.co.kr