Nutritional supplements do not pose the threat of "mad cow" disease to U.S consumers, the leading trade group for the industry assured the public on Friday. "There is no correlation between dietary supplements and mad cow," said David Seckman, CEO of the National Nutritional Foods Association. "There really aren't that many of them, and those that are out there come from suppliers with protected herds. There hasn't been a single nutritional supplement product linked to the disease," he added. Concerns over nutritional supplements and the risk of Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (CJD), a progressive and fatal degenerative brain condition that has been linked to mad cow disease or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), first arose at a recent meeting of the Food and Drug Administration. Although the FDA does not regulate most dietary supplements, its Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition does monitor some products sold for human health.
