There are two major sources of chondroitin used in products designed to help alleviate the effects of osteoarthritis. Those sources are - shark cartilage and cow trachea. Some experts, including a committee of U.S. government scientists, warn that taking chondroitin from cow trachea may lead to exposure to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), otherwise known as "mad cow disease."

The government committee that made warnings is the Committee on the Framework for Evaluating the Safety of Dietary Supplements, Food and Nutrition Board, Board on Life Sciences and is made up specially selected experts from the Institute of Medicine (IOM). That committee prepared several prototype safety reports concerning certain dietary supplements as examples of how to prepare a proper safety review of a dietary supplement. Among the prototype safety reports is a monograph reviewing glucosamine.

The "Prototype Monograph on glucosamine" can be downloaded as a .pdf file from www.iom.edu/Object.File/Master/19/560/0.pdf . It is 97-pages long so allow us to direct your attention to the applicable information. At pages C-7 to C-8 of that monograph, the scientists report:

Cartilage: Cartilage from various animal species has been used as a source of glucosamine and other cartilage-building factors such as chondroitin sulfate. Chondroitin sulfate for dietary supplements is generally derived from bovine cartilage and is frequently combined with glucosamine. [footnote omitted] Use of bovine by-products as the source of ingredients for dietary supplements and other products consumed by humans has been discouraged due to the possibility of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy contamination [i.e., mad cow disease]. There is some evidence that bovine trachea can, under aseptic conditions, be removed from cattle with naturally-occuring cases of BSE and be free of detectable levels of BSE infectivity. . .

Other medical experts agree with the government scientists. One medical expert - Dr. Theoharides (who is Yale-educated and presently a Professor of Pharmacology and Internal Medicine and of Biochemistry at Tufts University) - recommends avoiding supplements that fail to identify the source of chondroitin because they may use cow trachea resulting in the risk of mad cow disease. According to Dr. Theoharides, most cow trachea is imported from Europe and are imported to the U.S. even though use of them is banned in Europe. Dr. Theoharides's comments are at www.ic-network.com/guestlectures/theotranscript.html. Dr. Theoharides also wrote about this risk in an article entitled "Dietary Supplements For Arthritis And Other Inflammatory Conditions: Key Role Of Mast Cells And Benefit Of Combining Anti-Inflammatory And Proteoglycan Products" published in the European Journal of Inflammation in 2003 and found at www.algonot.com/pdf/Dietarysupplements.pdf. Look at page 2 of the article in the section entitled "Dietary supplements for arthritis."

Winston Wicomb, a biochemist with the Corixa Corporation, wrote an article entitled "Chondroitin Sulfate Manufacturing and Risk of Mad Cow Disease" addressing this issue. It can be found at www.stoneclinic.com/chondroitin_extraction.htm.

For the safety reasons described above, the chondroitin used in Syn-flex is from shark cartilage. If you are using or considering using a dietary supplement that contains chondroitin but the product's maker has not revealed the source of the chondroitin in his product, you would be wise to listen to the experts and insist on information about the source of the chondroitin so that you can make an informed choice about whether you want to use that product. If the product maker refuses to provide information about the source of the chondroitin, you may want to consider whether that it is an indication that the maker has something to hide - such as the fact that the source is cow trachea.

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