On the eve of the Tour de France and with the Beijing Olympics just around the corner, the time couldn’t be worse to discover that the test for detecting illegal supplements of the blood-boosting hormone erythropoietin (EPO) is unreliable. Because it is too late for doping authorities to alter testing regimes for either event, the worry is that cheats will go undetected.
Carsten Lundby and his colleagues at the in Denmark gave a course of EPO treatment to eight healthy individuals, and then sent blood samples from each of them to two independent laboratories accredited by the (WADA) in Montreal, Canada. The labs reported widely differing results. For example, during the first, intense “boosting” phase of EPO treatment, “lab A” concluded that all samples were positive for EPO, whereas “lab B” concluded they were all negative (Journal of Applied Physiology, ).
“This is worrying news,” says Lundby, who considered not publishing the results for fear of encouraging athletes to cheat, but pressed ahead to stimulate debate on how to tackle the problem.
Advertisement
However, he points out another, possibly worse problem: new drugs that are already used boost blood in the same way as EPO but would be missed even by a working test. Lundby’s answer is to detect doping by monitoring athletes’ blood all year round for suspicious fluctuations in blood cell counts.
Olivier Rabin of WADA says there are plans to implement such monitoring schemes – dubbed – in future, but adds that the existing EPO test will be used in Beijing.
Researchers from “Lab B”, meanwhile, have contested Lundby’s use of their results, and condemned the fact that he didn’t explain to them the purpose of the research, or give them a chance to check the manuscript. In a strongly-worded letter to the editor of the journal, Wilhelm Schänzer, head of the WADA-accredited “Lab B” in Cologne, compains that “the results are factually wrong”.
Schänzer says that the tests done were only a “first look”, and that further analyses would routinely have been done if the samples had come from an athlete. Moreover, he says that for the early “boosting phase”, Lab B’s conclusions were exactly the same as Lab A’s “positive” findings, but were given the more cautious grading of “suspicious”.
Schänzer says that Lundby mistakenly interpreted “suspicious” as “negative”, leading to a completely unfounded conclusion that the two labs had reached completely different conclusions.
Christiane Anyotte, the director of the Olympic analysis lab in Montreal, also weighed in with criticism, describing the paper as a “pseudo-scientific work”.
