BEEF SCARE SPREADS : EUROPEANS SHUN MEAT AS MARKET PRICES PLUNGE.

Byline: Mark Lawrence Associated Press

Britain's beef crisis is spilling over to the European continent, where Germans, Italians and others fearful of mad cow disease are shunning even home-grown meat and sending beef prices plummeting.

On Thursday, wholesale beef prices were down 50 percent in Paris, and supermarket sales in Portugal dropped by 40 percent. Sales were off by 25 percent in Italy, 30 percent in Spain and 60 percent in Greece.

``It's deathly quiet in the market,'' said Hansjoerg Uhl, chief of the main slaughterhouse in Munich, Germany. The German farmers' association said consumer demand for beef had dropped by 30-35 percent.

``I'll probably stick to pork and other meats for a while at least,'' said Walter Schlecht, a schoolteacher from Dettingen, Germany, although he conceded: ``Like everything else, it will wear off.''

In Dublin, Ireland, wholesale butcher Declan Gahan said he was worried because his customers ``have definitely turned away from beef.''

In Paris, at least one butcher appeared to be doing better.

``I always come here because the owner recites the biography of the beef he's selling me,'' a customer told the newspaper Liberation, which did not identify her by name. ``But I wouldn't buy any (beef) elsewhere, and in restaurants I would be afraid to.''

The main beneficiaries of the scare appeared to be fish and poultry dealers. In Greek markets, for example, demand for fish and poultry rose by 35 percent, driving up prices by some 10 percent.

``I eat more chicken or fish now,'' said Cordula Grewe, a student in Berlin.

The panic over mad cow disease - or bovine spongiform encephalopathy - has increasingly gripped Europe since March 20, when the British government announced new evidence linking the disease to a deadly human sickness.

Nations around the world began to ban British beef, which has the highest incidence of mad cow disease. Over the last decade, 160,000 cattle have been destroyed in Britain after showing signs of the disease; only about 400 cases have been recorded in the rest of Europe.

The European Union, trying to limit the scare to Britain's borders, on Wednesday ordered Britain to stop exporting its beef anywhere.

But that move failed to stop shoppers elsewhere in Europe from spurning beef - even when there was no chance it had ever set hoof in Britain.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1--Color) A sign inside a London McDonald's aler ts patrons of its non-British beef products.

Associated Press

(2) Workers cut steaks in Denver on Thursday. U.S. confidence in beef is up despite a ban on British meat.