(BRUSSELS) - Belgian food safety chiefs are stepping up checks on buffalo-milk mozzarella cheese imports from Italy in the wake of raised dioxin levels, a spokeswoman said Thursday.

The move comes as the European Commission mulled a ban, in the wake of similar import bans by Japan and South Korea.

Raised dioxin levels were found in more than 60 herds of buffalo -- whose milk is used for the speciality cheese -- around the Campania region of southern Italy last week.

Local officials have speculated that huge backlogs of untreated refuse left uncollected last year could have leached the deadly tioxins into the ground where the cattle graze.

"As a precaution, we have decided to reinforce our controls of samples of mozzarella made of buffalo milk from Campania," a spokeswoman for the Federal Food Chain Safety Agency in Belgium said.

"We've received information from Italy and we expect more," she said. "It was confirmed that the contaminated mozzarella was not exported to other EU countries or third countries."

Italian Agriculture Minister Paolo De Castro told a news conference in Rome that "there is no health problem".

Italy produces 33,000 tonnes of mozzarella per year, with some 250,000 buffalo producing the milk for the product.

Eighty percent is made in Campania, which is Italy's poorest region, according to figures from the Eurostat data agency. Naples is the region's main city.

Sixteen percent of all buffalo mozzarella is exported, with Japan importing 329 tonnes per year and South Korea 10 tonnes.

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