This is the most amazing development, a sport union refusing to capitulate to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). Forever sports have been dictated to by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and WADA under the threat of exclusion from the Olympic Games, and sports governing bodies such as the International Cycling Union (UCI) have been rendered as impotent as de-fanged, claw-less tigers. Pat McQuaid, president of the UCI, has no option but to join with the chorus of defamation of athletes, and Pat McQuaid must eagerly praise and defend WADA accredited laboratory test results; instead of defending his athletes against defamation by WADA.
Not so the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) who are fighting for their players, an original "anti-defamation league." NFLPA is demanding that WADA provide documentation related to WADA Human Growth Hormone (HGH) tests for independent scientific verification before the players union will allow WADA to conduct tests upon players in the NFL.
According to Juliet Macur of the New York Times, the NFLPA group demanding the documents is being lead by former Floyd Landis lead attorney Maurice Suh. Mr. Suh is complaining that WADA is refusing to release documents required to validate through independent research their scientific suppositions pertaining to HGH testing. Mr. Suh is also complaining that without the documentation, once a case reaches arbitration there will be no scientific basis to challenge a false positive test result.
Athletes the world over should applaud the efforts of the NFLPA scientific group and encourage them to continue to pressure WADA for scientific information. If the NFLPA forces WADA to lay their cards on the table before the case goes to arbitration this will save athletes millions of dollars in legal expenses and fees. These issues of scientific validity and reliability of HGH testing must be resolved by independent analysis of the data before the first drop of blood is drawn and before WADA tests the first sample, otherwise the testing will never be verified by independent means. WADA will enforce omerta, the code of silence among it's operatives and challenges by innocent athletes of WADA accredited laboratory generated false positive results will be so expensive and time consuming as to be prohibitive. Dr. Olivier Rabin and David Howman will be popping champagne corks over the successful prosecution of another convicted "doper," who lacked the time, energy, and resources to challenge "a clear laboratory result."
From the New York Times:
WADA officials said the false-positive rate [of WADA HGH tests] is as least one in 10,000 or that the test is 99.99 percent accurate.
Fine. That is a perfectly acceptable statement taken on trust. But as Ronald Reagan so aptly stated, there is a need to verify.
From the New York Times:
The Union said it wants to prove that false positive rate itself by letting its scientists examine the raw data. That includes data regarding the population studies done on athletes that helped set the limit that triggers a positive HGH test.
Ah yes, the classic threshold argument. What ratio of 22 kilodaltons to 20 kilodaltons constitutes threshold and synthetic HGH use? If the threshold is lowered, is it not also obvious to conclude that the false positive rate will increase?
From the New York Times: WADA science director Dr. Olivier Rabin replied to the NFLPA requests for documents this way:
What they want to do is to dig into more details and more things and we say that is not necessary because you have seen our results and we aren't hiding anything from you.
Trust us. You have seen our results and you have to accept our false positive rate. Therefore, you need not verify our conclusions through independent examination of the evidence. If Dr. Rabin offered me prime ocean front property in Arizona based upon this logic, I would refuse to cut him a check until there was independent verification of the property. Thus the problem: WADA truth may be nothing more than opinion, spin, and blue smoke blown up your posterior. Best to make sure through independent verification the validity of preposterous statements rather than to be swindled by deceptive promises that may not exist anywhere else but in WADA reality.
From the New York Times: Dr. Rabin raises another concern.
We are also very careful because people can misuse the information we used to generate the test. We have to protect our information from people who may be advising the athlete on how to cheat.
Yes, of course. Independent examination of WADA raw testing data is going to provide doping doctors with clues on how to deceive WADA laboratory detection! How quaint. That statement is quite scatological and even calamitous if it is directed at Maurice Suh and his independent group of scientific investigators. Even libelous!
This dispute is would be hilarious if so much was not at stake. But I have a solution that would go far to resolve the reliability question, a simple experiment.
A control sample containing a given ratio of 20 to 22 kilodalton isomers of HGH would be distributed to every WADA accredited lab in the world. This would be a simple double blind study because the person providing the sample to the laboratory and the people doing the testing would be blind as to what the sample contained. The instructions would read "test it, and keep a complete laboratory record of your work." At the conclusion of the testing all of the results would be shipped to Maurice Suh and his scientific team for analysis along with a team of WADA scientific experts. If all the laboratories have identical results this would prove once and for all that the test is reliable. If there were many disparate results this would suggest the following possibilities:
1) The test is unreliable.
2) A laboratory or several laboratories doing the testing are incompetent.
3) Therefore: any single result could be construed as a false positive result.
A test is only as good as the person doing the testing. If I hand a person a piece of paper with a one inch line drawn upon it and a ruler, and tell him to measure the line three times, the measurement should be one inch three times. If the measurements do not equal one inch every time, then I can conclude that the problem is not with the line or the ruler, but with the person doing the measuring.
Yes. WADA accredited laboratory Chatenay-Malabry did three testosterone/epitestosterone measurements on one urine sample of Floyd Landis and arrived a three different results. There is a great deal of certainty that the urine sample heated up during the testing and provided at least two false positive results. So, you see, WADA accredited laboratories are capable of making mistakes. WADA accredited laboratories are fallible and capable of generating false positive results and never should be used to test cyclists, football players, or any other athlete.
WADA should not object to my little reliability experiment should they? There is still a question of validity which would not by proven with my experiment, but that is a topic for another day.
No comments:
Post a Comment