ROME (AP) --

Scientists have found Italy's first suspected case of mad cow disease in a cow at a slaughterhouse that supplies meat to McDonald's restaurants in Italy and elsewhere in Europe.

The slaughterhouse in Lodi, in Italy's northern Lombardy region, belongs to the Cremonini group. Cremonini is the exclusive meat supplier for the American fast food giant's restaurants across Italy, company spokesman Massimiliano Parboni said Monday.

Parboni couldn't immediately say which other countries besides Italy get beef from the company.

Until Saturday, when the case was discovered, Italy had been considered mad-cow free. The only two cases reported there were two cows in 1994 which had been imported from Britain.

"We expected it. Italy could not be the exception," scientist Maria Caramelli told Canale 5 private TV on Monday.

Caramelli works with a team of scientists testing brain tissue from the cow. Final tests, to be released on Tuesday, were expected to confirm the earlier results.

McDonald's, which has 295 restaurants here serving 600,000 customers daily, recently put up signs in eateries across Italy to reassure consumers about the origin of its beef. It stood by its Italian supplier Monday, saying the "quality, traceability and safety" of its beef protect consumers.

"We have full trust in Cremonini, which has the country's highest quality procedures," said Alessandra di Montezemolo, European spokeswoman for the U.S. food giant.

Mad cow -- the common name for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE -- is a brain-wasting ailment that scientists believe was spread by recycling meat and bone meal from infected animals back into cattle feed. BSE wasn't identified until 1986, but by the mid-1990s, Britain was seeing tens of thousands of cases a year of infected cattle stumbling about as if drunk.

Then, in 1996, a link was established between BSE and a new and similar human illness called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a horrible crippling of the nervous system followed by death. So far more than 80 people have died, mostly in Britain.

The public health uproar abated after the European Union banned exports of British beef and feed in 1996 and millions of British cows were incinerated. But recently, new tests started turning up dozens of BSE cases in continental cows that apparently ate contaminated feed before the ban.

In the Italian case, the 6-year-old milking cow came from a breeding farm near Brescia, which has what Parboni described as "occasional contacts" with Cremonini. The 190 other cows on the Brescia farm have been banned from being slaughtered while the case is investigated.

Elsewhere Monday, cattle breeders throughout Spain began an indefinite blockade of slaughterhouses -- a move that could leave the country without meat stocks within days.

The blockade is intended to pressure the government to help alleviate the mad cow crisis. It was called by the country's three main breeder associations and backed by two farming unions, said Javier Lopez, president of one of the breeder associations.

"We're doing this out of despair," Lopez said.

Breeder estimate that the mad cow crisis has reduced meat consumption by 70 percent in Spain and caused financial losses of $65 million. They accuse the government of turning a blind eye to the crisis and demand compensation for their losses.