BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union‘s executive called on Wednesday for a new designer drug linked to at least five deaths to be banned throughout the 15-nation bloc. The European Commission said the amphetamine known as 4-MTA had been found by EU scientists to be more deadly than ecstasy (MDMA), the widely-used but illicit clubland pill. „The conclusion of the report is that compared with MDMA, 4-MTA appears to be associated with a higher risk of acute effects including adverse reaction and overdose,“ the Commission said in a statement. It said there were 15 known cases of overdose, five of them fatal. Four of the deaths were in Britain. The other was in the Netherlands. The Commission said so far only Sweden and Germany had made distribution of the drug illegal. Wednesday‘s proposal, if adopted, would oblige all EU countries to introduce similar control measures, it said. The proposal is the first to be made by the EU executive since EU countries agreed in 1997 to begin joint monitoring, risk assessment and control of new synthetic drugs.