{"id":9298,"date":"2012-04-25T17:20:49","date_gmt":"2012-04-25T22:20:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/?p=9298"},"modified":"2012-04-25T17:20:49","modified_gmt":"2012-04-25T22:20:49","slug":"what-the-latest-mad-cow-case-means-for-texas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2012\/04\/25\/what-the-latest-mad-cow-case-means-for-texas\/","title":{"rendered":"What the Latest Mad Cow Case Means for Texas"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo by Flickr user Andrea Rum\/Creative Commons<\/p>

The first case of mad cow disease in the U.S. in five years was discovered this week.<\/p><\/div>\n

The first case of mad cow disease in the U.S. since 2006 was found in California this week. While the diseased cow didn’t enter the food supply, consumers, ranchers and officials are all watching and waiting to see what happens next.<\/p>\n

So does Texas have cause to be concerned? The state’s agriculture commissioner, Todd Staples, said in a statement Tuesday that “American consumers can remain confident our food supply is the safest in the world, and Texas beef is as safe as ever.\u201d<\/p>\n

One possible effect of the mad cow case is a rise in beef prices. In an interview with KUT News<\/a>, Staples said that he and the\u00a0Texas beef industry<\/a>\u00a0are looking at beef\u00a0futures markets<\/a>\u00a0to see what’s ahead.\u00a0\u201cI feel pretty good that we\u2019ll be able to move forward,” he told KUT. “The fact that there is an\u00a0all-time low<\/a>\u00a0in the number of Texas and U.S. beef herds also indicates that maybe it won\u2019t have an economic impact.”<\/p>\n

NPR’s food blog The Salt<\/em> has a handy FAQ<\/a> about the disease and the food supply. They say that “the cow in question wasn’t destined for the food supply. Its carcass had been sent to a rendering plant in California,” where it would likely end up as pet food or some kind of industrial product. And the cow had a rare form of mad cow disease, which is “different than getting the disease from eating feed made out of bone and tissue from infected cattle, which caused the outbreaks in England in the 1980s and 1990s.” You can read the full post here.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first case of mad cow disease in the U.S. since 2006 was found in California this week. While the diseased cow didn’t enter the food supply, consumers, ranchers and officials are all watching and waiting to see what happens next. So does Texas have cause to be concerned? The state’s agriculture commissioner, Todd Staples, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":9301,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[60],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9298"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9298\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}