Topeka ? A case of suspected mad cow disease in Kansas would lead to the quarantine of the animal’s herd and possibly other individual herds, but no general restrictions on the movement of cattle inside the state or across its borders.

That’s because the brain-wasting disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, is not contagious and cannot spread by animal-to-animal contact, state Livestock Commissioner George Teagarden said Wednesday.

Cattle contract the disease, which eats holes in their brains, by eating feed that contains protein and bone meal from cows.

“The risk of a widespread epidemic — there is no risk of that,” Teagarden said. “We would not declare a state of emergency. It would not take masses of people to control the situation.”

There are more cattle in Kansas than any other state except Texas, 6.35 million on ranches and feedlots as of Jan. 1, the latest overall count available. Nearly a quarter of the cattle fed in the country do so on a Kansas feedlot, which housed 2.48 million cattle as of Dec. 1.

If a case of BSE was discovered in Kansas, Teagarden said the state would quarantine the animal’s herd and any herd from which it came to determine whether other animals had the disease.

The state’s plan for managing outbreaks of animal diseases calls for destroying diseased animals, with the costs borne by the state. The Animal Health Department, which Teagarden oversees, adopted the plan in March, a year after the Legislature revised the state’s emergency management laws.

“Although it’s a troubling disease, it’s a disease that can be controlled as long as we find it early,” said Kansas Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Derek Schmidt, R-Independence.

The state’s handling of a suspected mad cow case would be vastly different than a case of a contagious disease like foot-and-mouth. Teagarden said an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease would be an emergency and cause widespread mobilization of state and local officials and resources.

As for BSE, Teagarden said, “It’s a whole different disease.”

A herd’s quarantine would apply to an individual farm or farms where the herd was located. Under the state’s emergency plan, the standard quarantine area with a suspected case of a contagious disease would be a six-mile radius.

The quarantine would permit the state to control movement into and from the quarantine zone, decontaminate any sites and destroy diseased animals.