Re: Re:
bigcog said:
fmk_RoI said:
I have a feeling some will be looking for this thread today...
Why ?
Take a look at Robin Parisotto's and FMK's twitter accounts, there is some discussion about the rEPO deaths.
Here is one approach to put the 1987-1990 deaths in perspective I can't recall having seen.
According to the widely cited
New York Times article from 1991 ("Stamina-Building Drug Linked to Athletes' Deaths"), five Dutch cyclists died mysteriously in 1987, allegedly as victims of recombinant erythropoietin. At that time, there were around 300 patients been treated with rhEPO worldwide for the clinical trials, nobody else. If we assume that these five were the
only mysterious rhEPO-deaths, the "patients treated - mysterious deaths" - ratio is around one cyclist dead for every seventy rhEPO patients.
If we compare the situation to the mid-1990's to the years before the health tests, it is fair to assume that practically every endurance type of sport had rhEPO-problem and from the
published accounts we know that many athletes were elevating their hematocrit levels to low 60's and even beyond (Riis, 64 %) and this type of attitude must've been widespread. The product was very available and correspondingly the number of people treated with the hormone was in the six figure-levels both in Europe and in the United States.
If the (extremely clumsy but illustrative) 1:70 ratio would have any predictive validity, there should've been up to a few thousand deaths, but mysterious deaths pretty much ended in 1990, as Bernat López demonstrated in his essay. Instead of a few thousand deaths, why not even one or two professionals for the whole period of 1991-1996? At least I see a problem here for the standard panic-fueled story.
Of course the clumsy ratio doesn't address the issue whether cyclists might've had access to the drug in 1987, and it is possible that the group of Dutch who gained access to the substance in the late 1980's got the dosage wrong and the survived generation learned from their mistakes and used aspirin, night alarm clock etc. But how many Dutch cyclists used the substance if five managed to die in only one year? Only the 5? 50? 500? Why didn't the country win every trophy in the world if the drug use was so prevalent in that country? Another issue never addressed is that if anyone somehow managed to buy the (then expensive) rhEPO or get access to the powerful drug via other connections during the pre-pharmacy era, why didn't he spend a a few guldens to monitor his hematocrit levels and instead elevated his hematocrit blindly up to 70%'s?
One last point is that it is strange that when some people sometimes address the issue, they are under the impression that the death of Johannes Draaijer in 1990 started the spate of the mysterious deaths, when it started the KNWU
inquiry, public interest and moral panic, but was almost the
last mysterious death. I don't even think that Greg LeMond is intentionally lying when he discusses the issue in one of his lectures and talks about "100 deaths" between 1990 and 1995:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLVOCV5Nlms&feature=youtu.be&t=21m7s
(Kathy LeMond claims in the same video from 25:57- that Annalisa Draaijer would've admitted to her that her late husband Johannes Draaijer was on a EPO-program).