The Finnish government confirmed on Wednesday the discovery of a new scrapie case after a sheep on a farm in the west of the country was diagnosed with the brain-wasting illness similar to mad cow disease.

The sheep, which died last week, is the third scrapie case to be found so far in Finland. All 200 sheep on the affected farm have been culled, the Finnish Agriculture and Forestry Ministry said in a statement.

The National Veterinary and Food Research Institute of Finland confirmed the new case to be NOR-98 type, from which a sheep on a southern Finnish farm died last August.

Similar to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, scrapie is not transmittable to humans. It was first seen in Finland in a goat in 2002.

Source: Xinhua