Five Mexico players test positive for banned substance

[biopass]

What a shame that Man u forward isnt one of them.

LOL.

Real Madrid will probably be more focused to sign Chicharito now. They'll think: "He's that good without using drugs? Fuentes will make him better. Sign this guy immidiately!"

 

[Benotti69]

LOL.

Real Madrid will probably be more focused to sign Chicharito now. They'll think: "He's that good without using drugs? Fuentes will make him better. Sign this guy immidiately!"

might see some European teams taking some training camps in Mexico..

 

[Califootman]

might see some European teams taking some training camps in Mexico..

Wouldn't that be counterproductive? If members of a team get popped for clen in Mexico or China, they fail on the negligence criteria because they (and the team) should have known the hazards of eating local meat.

If the teams stay in Europe, they can claim to be innocent victims of contaminated meat, which of course occurs so rarely in this part of the world that they would have no reason to suspect it.

 

[Benotti69]

Wouldn't that be counterproductive? If members of a team get popped for clen in Mexico or China, they fail on the negligence criteria because they (and the team) should have known the hazards of eating local meat.

If the teams stay in Europe, they can claim to be innocent victims of contaminated meat, which of course occurs so rarely in this part of the world that they would have no reason to suspect it.

Do they fail on the negligence criteria, the table tennis players didn't IIRC.

Stay in Europe will only work if Contador proved it was the meat to CAS and sets a precedence, otherwise (for a team) its systematic doping. Remember Contador said it was the meat. There was no evidence except his word and his friends word and no doubt back dated receipts.

 

[Merckx index]

Do they fail on the negligence criteria, the table tennis players didn't IIRC.

Colo did, despite having a situation virtually identical to Nielsen. Clearly different national feds interpret the situation differently.

Also keep in mind that the more of these Mexican-tainted-meat stories emerge, the harder it will be for athletes to protest that they didn't know that Mexican meat might be contaminated. Really, the cat is out of the bag at this point, I think any athlete who eats meat in that country does so at his own risk. At least have witnesses and keep a sample. I found it particularly surprising that a Mexican official would support their story. He said in effect, "Oh, yes, all of us here in Mexico know that our meat is not safe to eat."

 

[Oldman]

Colo did, despite having a situation virtually identical to Nielsen. Clearly different national feds interpret the situation differently.

Also keep in mind that the more of these Mexican-tainted-meat stories emerge, the harder it will be for athletes to protest that they didn't know that Mexican meat might be contaminated. Really, the cat is out of the bag at this point, I think any athlete who eats meat in that country does so at his own risk. At least have witnesses and keep a sample. I found it particularly surprising that a Mexican official would support their story. He said in effect, "Oh, yes, all of us here in Mexico know that our meat is not safe to eat."

Most Americans know that and you don't need to be tested for Clen to gain evidence. It's usually, er...behind you. The gift that keeps giving.

 

[lean mean &green]

Nothing has apparently been reported yet about the level of CB detected. Studies have shown that, yes, a lot of Mexican meat is “contaminated”, meaning it wouldn’t pass EU inspection, but even so, much of that contaminated meat would not produce the level of CB found in Bert (50 ng/ml) (50 pg/mL)—which really was not that high.

Keep in mind that it took a highly sensitive apparatus to finger Bert. A more typical detection limit is around 100-200 ng/ml (pg/mL), and even that is far below the minimum detection limit required. To test at 200 ng/ml (pg/mL), you have to eat meat contaminated at a level that seems to be pretty uncommon even in Mexico. Still, we are talking about maybe 1-10%, odds far better than what Bert faces in Spain. To test at the minimum detection limit of 2 ug/ml (ng/mL)you would have to eat meat so contaminated that you might start worrying about a public health problem. So the actual level of CB detected could be quite relevant to their prospects of being cleared.

Beyond that, I think for these players to get off, they need to establish: 1) they all ate meat from the same source; and 2) (if possible) there was no one else who ate this meat who did not test positive.

i suspect you were rushing, your numbers/units are off here merckx. i've corrected them in parentheses but otherwise i agree.

the exact concentrations are important. i'd also expect the values to be consistent between each of the players assuming none of them gorged themselves on the meat in question eating two or three times as much as other players. for a number of reasons it should be easy to prove/disprove contamination in this case.

what's the lifespan of Clen in the system through food ingestion?

i'd expect clenbuterol use to be safely undetectable at about 10 days following the cessation of use at therapeutic doses. it's impossible to know how much the mexicans consumed but clenbuterol wouldn't likely be detected a few days (4-5 max) after a meal unless contamination was extremely high. depending upon the exact values, the story seems plausible to me assuming they arrived in the US just a day or two before being tested.

 

[Iker_Baqueiro]

Guess what ???

The Mexican Football Federation has hired the same lawyer that is handling the doping case of Alberto Contador !!

It looks clear to me that the case of the football players will be won easily. Then, the Spanish lawyer will try to leverage that victory to help Alberto.

 

[python]

just to remind some folks who are still open-minded, the acquitted german ponger's defence was in part based on the clenbuterol traces found in his teammates urine samples up to 5 days after the fated meal in china.

of course, the detection method employed was extremity sensitive.

 

[bobs nob]

Clen is the new Black

 

[krebs303]

Much of Mexican meat tainted with steroids
By TIM JOHNSON
McClatchy News Service

CELAYA, Mexico -- Positive drug tests for five standout members of Mexico’s national soccer team have forced Mexican officials to acknowledge a problem that goes far beyond sports: Much of Mexico’s beef is so tainted with the steroid clenbuterol that it sickens hundreds of people each year.

 

[hrotha]

I read somewhere that the five B samples tested negative. I don't know how that would be possible unless you deliberately sent them to a crappy lab for the counteranalysis to ensure the traces can't be detected.

 

[roundabout]

I read somewhere that the five B samples tested negative. I don't know how that would be possible unless you deliberately sent them to a crappy lab for the counteranalysis to ensure the traces can't be detected.

From what I've read the test was done at UCLA.

 

[python]

the samples were given in mexico and the a-sample was definitely analysed at ucla.

i don't have any hard information as to where the b-sample has gone but the probability of being tested at ucla is 99%.

such is wada requirement and with few exceptions is normally carried out.

ucla is the biggest (most active wada lab) with very good reputation.

 

[YoRUsh]

I read somewhere that the five B samples tested negative. I don't know how that would be possible unless you deliberately sent them to a crappy lab for the counteranalysis to ensure the traces can't be detected.

As I read in Dutch media, new tests showed no sign of clen, so it could be something similar as what happened with Contador, with an extremely small amount of clen, that was not noted one day later. In football that probably is enough to be cleared right away...

 

[Merckx index]

ESPN got their hands on the levels for the 5 soccer players

http://www.record.com.mx/verano-tric...-seleccionados

600-4000+ pg/ml, about 10-100x more than Bert. This would have to be very heavily contaminated meat.

E.g., estimates of the amount of CB Bert must have originally had in his system range from perhaps 100-500 ng, or 1-5 kg of meat that would just pass inspection in the EU (0.1 ug/kg). So for the soccer players we are talking about 1-5 kg of meat of 1-10 ug/kg., or more realistically, say, 200 g of meat of 5-50 ug/kg. Even for Mexico, this is pretty bad. A study I cited earlier found only 10% of the meat of the street > 3 ug/kg, and none over 6 ug/kg. The meat these guys ate would probably be in the 1% or less range of all meat in Mexico.

Then again, as I also said before, most athletes in Mexico don't test positive for CB. The tests most labs used probably aren't that sensitive, and it requires unusually contaminated meat to trigger detection. Some of the reported values are still below the 2 ng/ml minimum required level.

 

[theswordsman]

ESPN got their hands on the levels for the 5 soccer players. A nanogram = 1000 picograms. Contador was at 50 picograms, which was 1/40th of the lab testing standard of 2000 picograms. All had much higher levels than Alberto, but four would not have been positive at most labs.

http://www.record.com.mx/verano-tricolor/2011-06-16/filtran-niveles-de-clembuterol-en-seleccionados

Christian "Hobbit" Bermudez: 0.6 ng / mL
Edgar Dueñas: 0.8 ng / mL
Guillermo Ochoa: 1.1 ng / mL
Francisco Javier Rodriguez: 1.3 ng / mL
Antonio Naelson 'Sinha': 4.2 ng / mL

In picograms per milliliter:
600
800
1100
1300
4200

Have fun

 

[Merckx index]

ESPN got their hands on the levels for the 5 soccer players

http://www.record.com.mx/verano-tric...-seleccionados

See also my reply just above this post. An important question arises: did they all eat the same meat? If so, the fact that one player had a level 3-7x that of the others is suspicious. OTOH, if he ate a different sample of meat, it's suspicious that there were two independent sources of meat this heavily contaminated.

The other four values are fairly close to each other, with differences certainly explainable in terms of different amounts of meat eaten as well as different kinetics. But they could also all be on a similar CB doping regimen. The values are high enough so that they could result from fairly recent administration of CB.

Here again is the link to an old but useful study on the pharmacokinetics of CB in humans and some other animals:

http://ci.nii.ac.jp/els/11000363798...der_no=&ppv_type=0&lang_sw=&no=1308256813&cp=

They note, for example, that a single dose of 40 ug was followed by excretion in the urine over twenty-four hours of about 5 ug. Assuming about a liter of urine passed during this time, the average concentration would be 5 ng/ml. Levels would be perhaps 2-3 times higher if this dose were taken daily for several days, and of course higher still if larger doses were used.

But after 2-3 days, the values fall off markedly. So all the reported values for the soccer players could have resulted from CB doping, followed by termination several days before the tests. Assuming they all knew they could get tested on a certain day of the game (?), they might all plan to stop taking the CB at the same time, to allow it to clear, and this could account for why, in four of the cases, the values are similar. So the similarity, for these four, is not necessarily very good evidence of meat contamination, but it does support their case, whereas the one with the very high value may have a problem.

So how relevant is this for Bert? In terms of the psychological or public perception angle, I think it helps him a lot. Here are five athletes with levels more than ten times higher than his. If they get off, it will appear to a lot of people that he should.

Scientifically, though, his major problem remains the source of meat. Unless he can demonstrate that contaminated meat really is a problem in Spain, I don't see how events in Mexico help him. The Mexican public health dept. claimed that contaminated meat is extremely rare there, but numerous studies don't back up that claim. AFAIK, there are no such studies in Spain. At the end of the day, the location of the meat source is far more important than the level of CB detected in the urine.

 

[peloton]

Scientifically, though, his major problem remains the source of meat. Unless he can demonstrate that contaminated meat really is a problem in Spain, I don't see how events in Mexico help him. The Mexican public health dept. claimed that contaminated meat is extremely rare there, but numerous studies don't back up that claim. AFAIK, there are no such studies in Spain. At the end of the day, the location of the meat source is far more important than the level of CB detected in the urine.

wasn't there a big Clen bust in Spain during the winter, iirc?

 

[hrotha]

wasn't there a big Clen bust in Spain during the winter, iirc?

Involving racehorses for the most part, yes.

 

[Polish]

So the 5 players had the following clen levels in picograms per milliliter:
600
800
1100
1300
4200

Couple questions.

First, if these numbers are indicative of eating a contaminated meal, isn't Alberto's level of 80 picograms kind of low? Light eater?

Second, if one was to reset the min threshold for a clen fail to avoid busting food cases - what would you set the threshold at? 4250 picograms?

 

[Oldman]

Involving racehorses for the most part, yes.

Maybe they had a special dinner and to prevent contamination had some special meat flown in from Spain. Just say "neigh" to contaminated meat.

 

[sniper]

it'll be interesting to hear whether the five players are doing hairtests.
little to argue with a hairtest.

 

[python]

i think the earlier reports of the b-samples testing negative are inconsistent and likely inaccurate.

first, based on my understanding of the clen tests methodology it would be highly unlikely that the significant amounts found in the a-samples could somehow vanish (unless 5 tests were totally screwed up - unlikely)

second, this article relates some other tests 3 weeks after the a-sample positives. these tests are probably not the official b-samples as the article still refers to the open case and pending testing of b-samples
third, i could not find any official statements about the b-samples or the lifting of suspensions on the mexican futbol federation site whilst the a-sample positive is clearly there.

once again, probably a misguided or misinformed media source created an unsubstantiated rumour.

 

[theswordsman]

This journalist claims that he was told there were actually 12 Mexican soccer players, not 5, who tested positive for Clenbuterol on May 21. He cites the source as saying that the others weren't named because they had less than .5 nanograms (500 picograms) of Clenbuterol, which "isn't considered doping". That's ten times the amount Contador had, by the way. I don't know if it's true, but if it is, I hope it comes out, because twelve athletes at one national dining hall testing positive the same day would be a huge story, as in WADA would have problems defending the lack of a minimum threshold.

http://impreso.milenio.com/node/8978489