I thought I would drop down a few thoughts on doping controls and cost etc. My background is not in doping control at all, however I have spent many years working in the fresh produce and food industry and one of the my primary roles during that time has been pesticide use in foods and residue detection. If you are wondering what the connection between the two might be, they are both concerned with detecting inorganic chemicals that breakdown over time in organic substances.
Pesticide residue testing is exactly the same science as dope testing. A sample is taken, it has to be handled in certain ways to ensure the sample is clean. A small amount of the sample is taken for the actual test and the remains of the original sample are kept for re-testing, if the original test comes back with an MRL (maximum residue level) exceedence, for a doping test read positive.
If you look at how residues of pesticides, or doping products are detected, unfortunately its not an exact science and also relies on the skill of the chemist doing the analysis to interpret the results. Residue detection is usually done by gas or liquid chromatography, or mass spectrometry. Essentially what this means is that the sample is split out into a spectrum of peaks, with certain peaks corresponding to the presence of certain elements, depending on the height of the peaks gives an indication of the level of the chemical in the sample. If the peak is not quite right, or slightly in the wrong place, it is then open to interpretation and can either lead to a false positive, or a false negative.
For pesticide residue testing, its an interesting situation, mostly because we are looking for the presence of chemicals below a certain threshold, the MRL. When pesticides are applied to a crop of fruit or vegetables, there is normally what is termed a harvest interval. This is the period a grower has to wait between applying the pesticide and harvesting it. This allows the plant to metabolise the product and break it down to a level that wont leave a residue in excess of an MRL. For some chemicals, this is a long period 21 days or so, for others it can be 24 hours and for others the product is broken down immediately and essentially indetectable.
When we test for residues, there are multi-screen tests that pick up on a wide range of products, but not all, as there are specific compounds that need specific tests for. Therefore unless you are knowledgeable of what products have been used, you could miss a potential residue by not testing for it. Also, depending on what you want your residue testing to show, you can target the timing of testing through the season to either avoid having any positive results, or to have plenty of positive results. i.e if I want to show that a grower is producing clean residue results for fungicides, I would do all my testing when I know that the crop is not at risk from disease and these chemicals would not be used, or I would do a multi-residue test that shows 150 or so products tested for but no positives, but doesn’t actually test for the compound I know the grower has used, so great from a PR, customer appeasement perspective, but failing to target the actual issue. Does this sound familiar to anyone when thinking about drug testing!!
The last thing to think about is the level of accuracy of results. When we look at residue testing, we work on the limit of determination (LOD). This is the minimum level we can guarantee the results are accurate. As residue levels get to a very low level, it becomes more difficult to accurately and confidently report a result. Therefore all labs used for testing have to be able to report to an agreed minimum level. It will come as no surprise that some labs which are very good and have newer apparatus can accurately detect residues far below this limit, however, any residues detected below the LOD are ignored, as that is the agreed minimum level of accuracy. Therefore many residues which are present are ignored because they are below agreed standards. This is very similar to the Contador / Clenbuterol situation where most labs wouldn’t have picked up the residue and this would never have hit the press!!
A bit more info can be found on epo testing here
http://www.doping.chuv.ch/files/epobyms_04.pdf
In terms of costs, I dont know whether doping labs charge a lot more, because the sport will bear the costs, however from a standard residue testing point of view, costs would be as follows:
Single multi-screen residue test (around 150 compounds) £200
If testing for a specific compound not covered in a multi screen test, you would be looking at between £50-£100.
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