Mr. Obvious wrote:
Subway Surfers Addiction wrote:Actually, look up Frank Shorter 2010 on youtube and you will find that at about the 40:50min mark Shorter will explain how the bag deteriorates little plastic particles or as he says "leaching of the plastic from a transfusion bag." This why I thought that the Salazar/Brown/NOP would have raised red flags by using transfusion bags for l-carnitine and vitamin D.
well, so here is the deal. They can test for the presence of plastic residue in your blood. You are going to test positive, so am I, so is everybody else on the board. It is ubiquitous in our environment. There is no way to tell blood bag plastic from other sources (this is a little simplified as there are different types of plastic and these can ne distinguished but the ones in blood bags are very common).
Given that background, it is nearly impossible to determine a baseline level for a population. It is also not really able to show how high it might spike and how long that spike might last. It then can't be shown that any spike came from a transfusion and not, for instance, a cyclist drinking from his plastic water bottle.
Lastly, Salazars athletes can legally receive transfusions in small amounts, so showing they did so means nothing.
You are correct it is an interesting issue. How long these "plastic leachings" are detectable for would be interesting to find out. If an athlete was getting less than 50ml of something, I doubt it is remotely detectable, but up to 1 litre (1000ml) as being suggested by Ritz & Magness would surely show up something. This is really a side issue to the argument of somebody above claiming wild hematocrit variation through fasting and dehydration. My point is if the athlete had a spike in their passport they obviously will look for reasons and transfusions are one, epo is another. USADA obviously tests for blood doping, not sure about WADA but I presume so.
Personally, I belive that they have put alot of effort into minimizing large scale blood doping but at the same time they have taken their eyes of speed & power events and have very allowed them to fester in a PED swamp.