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Madness ot fear cattle disease

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Foo Sze-hung, 54, owner of the butcher's shop Jumbo in Causeway Bay, has been selling beef for 14 years. He lives in North Point and has to get up at 6 am every day to buy meat from the wholesale market in Western. He has a son and a daughter.

What's on your mind? It has been quite a bad few days for butchers because of the mad cow disease scare in Britain. Some housewives turn to buying pork or chicken, while others ask me about the source of my beef. Our business has dropped slightly but is still all right.

It is silly for some people to think that beef sold in Hong Kong could have been from cattle which contracted any disease in the UK. Beef in Hong Kong is mostly imported from Guangdong or Hunan provinces. It is much cheaper. No wholesaler would be so silly as to fly beef from England.

The method of rearing cattle in foreign countries is quite different to that in China, where cows are allowed to stray on the hillside and eat grass. Foreign cows are kept in big farms where there are things like factory production lines.

What are you going to do about it? I don't worry much about it, to be honest. Hong Kong people are rather forgetful because they have too many things to do and care about. And issues die down quickly.

Two weeks ago it was the tax rise; last week it was the Taiwan and China crisis. And you see, people have forgotten about salary tax now.

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