LONDON -- New research virtually eliminates the likelihood of mad cow disease being transmitted from one generation of cattle to the next, Reuters quoted a senior British government adviser on the disease as saying on Monday.

Professor John Wilesmith of the Veterinary Laboratories Agency said he was convinced animals could contract the deadly disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), only by eating feed contaminated with meat and bone meal (MBM).

MBM is banned in the European Union because scientists believe it is the main agent spreading the virus, which has hit cattle herds in Britain, France, other European countries and Japan.

"I think the concern at the moment that we have is cross-contamination of feedstuffs which have been imported into Britain, and so there is still a possibility that one could get cross-contamination in the holds of ships and so on because meat and bone meal has been traded around the world and we know that a certain number of countries have it (BSE)," Wilesmith told BBC radio.

Wilesmith's experiments took embryos produced by BSE-infected cows and bulls and put them in the wombs of surrogate mothers. None of the calves or the surrogate mothers contracted the disease.

Tim Miles, the chief veterinary surgeon at Britain's Meat and Livestock Commission, said that while the research left the cattle feed industry with a problem on how to screen imported feedstuffs, it was "very good news" for UK exports of embryos.

"We've got a complete ban in place on the export of live animals and embryos, so this research that shows there isn't any maternal transmission through this route means that we can press the case to get our embryos exported again," he said.

"We have put in place strict controls in the UK but we are at the mercy of any cross-contamination of our vegetable raw materials that might take place before we receive them," he said.

Britain first uncovered BSE in its national herd in 1986 and a decade later linked the disease to its deadly human equivalent, variant creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which has killed more than 100 people.