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Re: Olympic Games-London 2012 -INFO, News, & Results.
Drug testing may only catch one in eight athletes who take performance enhancing drugs: study
James Armstrong, Global News : Wednesday, 25 July, 2012
TORONTO – Thousands of elite athletes are descending upon London to take part in the 2012 London Olympics the concern remains that despite improvement in detection, some athletes using performance enhancing substances are still able to pass standard blood and urine tests.
The efforts to catch athletes who dope has also ramped up since Ben Johnson’s fall from grace in 1988 – gone are the days of tests after events for those who win a medal, being replaced by a record 5,600 scheduled tests in 2012 – up from 4,700 at the 2008 games in Beijing.
Though a small fraction – between 0.5 to one per cent according to experts - of elite athletes tested for prohibited substances return a positive result, a study published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence suggests many more athletes have used prohibited drugs – most without being caught.
The study, done by Professor Heiko Striegel, and Rolf Ulrich of the University of Tübingen, and Perikles Simon from the Centre for Disease Prevention and Rehabilitation at the Johannes Gutenberg University surveyed elite athletes in Germany and found many athletes admitted to using prohibited substances at some point in their career – most without being caught.
The study issued a survey to 25,437 athletes tested in Germany between 2003 and 2005, of which only 205 actually tested positive for prohibited substances. Approximately 6.8 per cent of them admitted to having used doping substances – a conclusion, the study’s author note suggests “official doping tests underestimate the true prevalence of doping in elite sports by more than a factor of eight.”
Many prohibited substances, such as anabolic steroids, will become untraceable in an person’s blood after periods of no use.
“The cheating athlete has also got more sophisticated, so it’s a continuing battle if you like to make sure the scientists that we engage think like cheats, and be a jump ahead,” David Howman, Director-General of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in Montreal, said.
Though a new method of testing is being implemented by the CCES) in Ottawa and WADA – an agency working as a watchdog at the London games - that could effectively catch those who use prohibited substances between Olympics, or substances that are currently undetectable.
“The creative chemist can take a steroid, for example, and they can manipulate the molecular structure, change it a little bit, and then it’s harder for the lab to detect, because it’s true that the lab can only detect what it knows its looking for,” said Paul Melia from the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES).
The new method is a form of continuous test entitled “biological passports,” to which athletes are forced to submit.
“For each individual athlete, we establish their parameters in blood and urine for various specific parameters. With each subsequent test then, we’re comparing those parameters for that individual athlete against their own individual normal baseline parameters,“ said Melia.
The passports, through multiple sample collections, track the biological attributes of an athlete. Along with traditional blood and urine tests, doping officials are able to track an athlete throughout the off-season, regardless of whether they use substances which cannot be tracked.
“And if we see a significant deviation in the reticulates levels in their blood for example and we don’t know what substance or what method might account for that, it doesn’t matter,” said Melia.
Though some drugs or methods of cheating cannot be positively identified by blood and urine tests, the biological passport purports to detect those drugs by pointing to unusual changes compared to the athlete's normal sample measurements.
© Global News. A division of Shaw Media Inc., 2012.
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