Spain hopes to eliminate mad cow disease from the country by 2010, the country's top veterinary officer announced last Friday.

With 668 cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, known popularly as Mad Cow Disease, reported in the country since 2000, Spain is currently ranked No. 4 in terms of BSE "prevalence" in Europe, said Juan Jose Badiola, president of the College of Veterinarians.

The vet added that although since 2003 the number of cases had been dropping, with only 55 reported so far this year that he wants it to be "totally eradicated in four or five years."

A third of incidences of BSE in Spain occur in the rainy lush pastures of Galicia, in the northwest.

The human form of the Creutzfeld-Jakob disease is rare but fatal, and is caused by eaten meat from infected cows. Spain's only known death from the disease happened in July 2005 when a 26 year old woman died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob at a hospital in Madrid's outskirts.

The disease, first reported in Britain in the mid-1980s, has been blamed on farmers adding recycled meat and bone meal from infected cows into cattle feed.

Authorities believe eating meat from infected animals can cause a variant of the fatal brain-wasting disease, which has killed around 150 people, mostly in Britain, since the mid-1990s.