The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture to provide a timeline of the decisions and events leading to the department's announcement Tuesday of a new case of mad-cow disease, which jolted markets before the information was officially released.

U.S. live-cattle futures prices began tumbling on rumors at least two hours before the USDA announced the first reported U.S. case of mad-cow disease--formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy--since 2006.

The CFTC, the main regulator of derivatives markets in the U.S., "reached out to USDA with questions on the BSE announcement timeline for their routine market analysis," a USDA spokeswoman said in a statement Friday.

A CFTC spokesman declined to comment.

Cattle-futures prices at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange began sliding around noon EDT on Tuesday and by 1:40 p.m. had fallen by three cents, the exchange-imposed limit for one-day price moves in either direction. That was about a half hour before reporters attended a news briefing in which the USDA released information.

"This was clearly in the marketplace well prior to the USDA's announcement," said Jim Robb, director of the Livestock Marketing Information Center, an analysis and forecasting organization funded by universities, USDA agencies and private members.

Rumors were surfacing on Twitter and elsewhere around midday Tuesday. The USDA sent an email to news reporters around 1:45 p.m., inviting them to attend a briefing at 2:15 p.m. for an unspecified announcement. In the email, the department said the news was subject to an embargo--meaning reporters agreed to delay publishing the information until a time set by the source.

At the start of the briefing, agency officials specified an embargo of 3 p.m. EDT. However, media outlets went ahead and began reporting on the news before then.

The USDA originally planned to publicly release the information at 5 p.m., according to a timeline of agency events obtained by Dow Jones Newswires. The government moved up the announcement after it began receiving inquiries about a potential mad-cow case from industry officials around 12:45 p.m., the timeline said.

The timeline said the embargo was intended to give reporters enough time to understand the situation before reporting it.

Live-cattle futures recovered in electronic trading after the USDA's formal announcement, as traders weighed the fact that meat from the diseased cow did not enter the food supply.

-By Ian Berry, Dow Jones Newswires; 312-750-4072; ian.berry@dowjones.com

--Bill Tomson and Jamila Trindle contributed to this article.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 27, 2012 18:16 ET (22:16 GMT)