HOUSTON – Shane Sklar would like you to know what he had for dinner last night: a big steak.
Sklar is executive director of the Independent Cattlemen’s Association of Texas, a leading trade organization in the nation’s leading cattle-producing state. Like many in the industry, he awoke Saturday to reports that a cow confirmed to have mad cow disease might have been from Texas.
The reports fueled reaction from Washington, D.C., where federal officials said they would use DNA tests to confirm the animal’s herd, to Taiwan, where officials reinstated the nation’s ban on U.S. beef imports.
In Texas, industry leaders circled the wagons on Saturday.
They pointed out that the cow appears to be the only confirmed case among 388,000 animals tested in the United States in the last year.
There is no evidence that the infected cow entered the human food chain. Even if it had, the public would not have been at risk, Sklar said. The disease is typically confined to an animal’s spinal column and does not spread into muscle tissues that comprise cuts of meat consumed in the United States, he said.
“You are not going to find it in a rib-eye,” Sklar said. “What we have is a very, very low prevalence of this disease in our country.”
But those arguments are often lost on the public. That is no trifling matter in a state that is home to 151,000 ranchers, cattlemen and dairy farmers – 15 percent of the nation’s total. There are about 14 million cattle here worth about $9.7 billion.
A previous case of mad cow disease in the United States, the 2003 discovery of an infected cow imported to Washington state from Canada, sent beef exports tumbling by almost $2.5 billion. The stock of fast food chains that rely on beef fell, too.
It was not clear Saturday what the response of the Japanese government would be. It was the largest importer of U.S. beef before banning it after the 2003 case, and talks had been under way between the two governments about resuming imports. Taiwan, which also banned imports after the 2003 case, only recently resumed imports and announced Saturday that it was banning U.S. beef again.
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