A case of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), a neurological illness more ridiculously known as Mad Cow Disease, cropped up in the U.S. on Tuesday for the first time in six years. But there’s no need to worry, according to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who said that the incident poses “no risk to the food supply or to human health.” Experts told Reuters that the case was atypical, “a rare occurrence in which a cow contracts the disease spontaneously, rather than through the feed supply.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture said that the cow’s carcass is being held at a rendering facility and will be destroyed. The USDA is also tracing the “exact life of the infected animal,” which probably went something like this: It was chilling on a farm in California, began feeling weird one day, then got pulled away from its farm to get ceremoniously wrecked at a “rendering facility,” its legacy only as the cow that sparked fear among dairy and beef exporters.
