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Drug testing news for August 2

EPO test approved by medical commission

The Olympic Games in Sydney should see the introduction of urine and blood tests to detect EPO, after the International Olympic Committe medical commission approved them today. The commission examined both the French developed urine test and the Australian developed blood test and deemed them to be suitable for use in September. This comes a little over month after the urine test was almost, but not quite, given the go ahead to be used in this year's Tour de France.

A 15 member panel took two days to examine the research presented to them and agreed that for an athlete to be found guilty, both the urine and blood tests must give a positive result. However, the legal aspects will have to be approved as well, and this will be decided after meetings held on August 28-29.

Despite the potential benefits to cleaning up drugs in sports, there are still drawbacks with the above approved method. Firstly, the tests are not cheap: the French costs around $2000 per sample, and the Australian $600-800 per sample, meaning that the Australian test will be used as the initial screen. If the blood test is positive, the urine test will then be applied and if that is positive, then the athlete will be sanctioned.

The problem with this is that although the blood test will detect EPO use up to three weeks after its injection, the urine test will not: 72 hours is its reasonable limit. Given that EPO is a "long term" drug - it takes several weeks to grow new red blood cells, the effectiveness of the tests will be lessened if used just prior to the Olympics (or any other race). Out of competition urine samples will need to be taken 4-6 weeks beforehand, frozen, and tested retrospectively if the blood test is positive. Otherwise a likely scenario for guilty athletes is "positive blood test, ambiguous/negative urine test" and this is not enough to convict them according to the IOC.