Mad cow suspected at Big Mac supplier in Italy
The first suspected case of mad cow disease in an Italian animal has been found in a slaughterhouse which supplies meat to McDonald's in Italy.
The slaughterhouse in Lodi belongs to the Cremonini group, which is the meat supplier for the restaurants across Italy.
Cremonini spokesman Massimiliano Parboni says he can't immediately say which other countries gets the beef destined for McDonald's.
McDonald's says it has no immediate comment.
Until Saturday, Italy had been considered mad cow free. The only two cases reported previously were two cows in 1994 which had been imported from Britain.
"We expected it, Italy could not be the exception," said scientist Maria Caramelli.
She is on the team testing brain tissue from the cow.
The six-year old milking cow was born and raised in Lombardy. It came from a breeding farm near Brescia, which has what Parboni described as "occasional contacts" with Cremonini.
The Cremonini group supplies roughly 40% of the beef to Italian markets.
The other 190 cows on the Brescia farm have been banned from being slaughtered, while investigators in Brescia have started a probe.
McDonald's, which has 295 restaurants in Italy serving 600,000 customers daily, recently put up signs in outlets across Italy to reassure consumers about the origin of the beef.
