LISBON, Portugal -- Portugal has detected the first case of mad cow disease in the Azores, a region exempted from a European Union ban on Portuguese beef exports, the Agriculture Ministry said.

The Fresian cow stricken by the disease had been imported two years ago to the island of Sao Miguel from Germany, where it was born in September 1995, the ministry added in a statement.

The cow was slaughtered on October 2 and the carcass destroyed immediately on showing signs of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).

Veterinary authorities have placed the farm under embargo and informed their counterparts in Germany.

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The remote chain of islands is located 1,600 km (1,000 miles) from mainland Portugal in the mid-Atlantic.

Portugal has repeatedly protested that the EU embargo is unfair because it has stricter measures to control brain-wasting BSE than many other European countries.

Since 1989 there have been 452 confirmed cases of BSE in Portugal, according to the World Organisation for Animal Health. It has the third highest number of cases, slightly behind Ireland with 499, and well behind the U.K. with 177,465 cases since 1988.

The ministry says the incidence of BSE in Portugal currently stands at 200 per million, down from 240 tallied in the 12 months to September 1999, and is on course to be eradicated by 2003.

The discovery of BSE in the Azores comes after Spain announced its first case of mad cow disease this week.

A second cow was also suspected of having BSE and both had been destroyed, Spanish Agriculture Minister Miguel Arias Canete said earlier.

In a bid to discover how far BSE has penetrated Europe's herds, the EU has decided that all cattle destined for the food chain aged above 30 months will undergo post-mortem tests.

BSE first surfaced in Britain in 1986. But it was only ten years later that the government acknowledged there could be a link between mad cow disease and a similar condition in humans, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD).

Reuters contributed to this report.

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