Lausanne, Switzerland (Le Matin, Fre) – The Mitchell Report in the US on baseball and steroids use has put the spotlight on drugs and sports again. In Lausanne, a recent discovery of a powder used by some athletes is indicative of the difficulty of the struggle to beat cheaters. Research goes on quietly at the Swiss Laboratory for Doping Analysis, one of the 33 labs worldwide that are authorized to test athletes for doping, and Martial Saugy, the director, shrugs off the find as only one more part of the puzzle and therefore "not significant" in finding foolproof ways to test athletes. The powder, which can discreetly be put on fingertips or the tip of the penis, breaks down certain proteins in urine, rendering it unreadable by laboratories checking for doping. An increasing problem seen by labs such as the Lausanne one is urine samples that cannot be tested properly, so that results are uncertain.
Background article on the lab’s work, Swissinfo, 4 August 2006
This work by genevalunch.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.
News story, GenevaLunch, 14 December 2007.
Filed under: Society, Sports, World news
Tags: Lake Geneva region, Swiss news
June 5th, 2011 at 9:10 am
[...] EPO and the cycling world was hotly debating their validity. A year later a Paris lab, one of the 33 labs worldwide authorized to test athletes for doping set the criteria for testing positive at 85 percent or higher of the typical EPO parameters, [...]