Dope cheats face testing times at London 2012

Reuters – Sat, Jul 28, 2012 LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists working around the clock at a specially equipped anti-doping lab on the outskirts of London will analyze more than 6,000 urine and blood samples during the 2012 Olympics.

The process - from obtaining the sample through to delivering what may be career-ending results back to athlete and coach - is highly sensitive and demands high levels of speed, skill and security.

Any of the more than 10,000 athletes can be required to test anytime, anywhere - trackside, poolside, in the athletes village or in private houses and whether they are already in Britain or still at training camps outside of the country.

The testing experience - which has the potential to bring shame and humiliation down on anyone caught cheating - starts when an Olympic anti-doping official approaches an athlete and tells them they've been selected.

TESTING TIMES

It's a conversation that will take place with thousands of athletes across all sports and nationalities and will include all medal winners, organizers say.

Many top athletes will face repeat tests before the Games end on August 12.

If they refuse to give a sample, athletes can be banned from coming to London to compete or they can be sent home, as Hungarian discus thrower Zoltan Kovago found out last week.

Those who agree to be tested are accompanied by a chaperone at all times until they get to a doping control station where samples are taken.

The athlete provides a sample - of either urine or blood -which is then split into two lots, A and B, so that one can be used for back-up testing if results on the A sample are queried.

The athletes themselves are required to seal the bottles and fill in the paperwork - a protocol designed to minimize the risk of contamination.

The sample bottles have tamper-proof seals that can only be opened using specialist equipment in the lab.

In a detailed statement on Saturday about how the Albanian weightlifter Hysen Pulaku was caught, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said that after traces of the anabolic steroid stanozolol were found in his A sample, given on July 23, he was contacted and told of the findings.

Pulaku became the first athlete to be ejected from London 2012 and now faces a possible two-year sanction by the International Weightlifting Federation.

Both Pulaku and his coach and uncle Sami Pulaku said they could not understand how the drug ended up in the athlete's body, but they accepted the result and said they would not be contesting the decision.

The coach, who according to minutes of the meeting said he was "depressed" to hear Hysen Pulaku had tested positive, also said he didn't feel it was necessary to test the B sample.

But the weightlifter disagreed, and asked for tests on the B sample to be carried out. Under a strict protocol, designed to ensure fairness, Pulaku's B sample was opened and analyzed in his presence on July 25.

The results, which confirmed the A sample findings, were sent to the IOC the following day.

ANONYMITY ENSURES SECURITY

Experts say one of the most important features of accurate and secure drug testing is anonymity.

"Being found guilty of being a dope cheat in sport carries an enormous stigma, so it is only fair to the athletes that systems for testing are flawless," said Leon Edwards who runs Versapak Doping Control, a tamper-proof equipment maker.

"Modern procedures have every step covered, from incorruptible sample-gathering, tamper-evident methods of transportation and robust lab tests," he added.

At London 2012, samples are identified only by a barcode from the point at which they are secured in bottles. This means neither the couriers carrying the samples to and from the lab, nor any of the scientists carrying out the tests, are able to know which athlete is being tested.

The samples are sent on an hourly basis and arrive at the anti-doping lab in Harlow, east of London, in a blue silver-lined box and have the barcode scanned in before testing begins.

The first task is for one of the 150 international scientists working to open and analyze sample A, and freeze and securely store sample B. The testing uses liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry equipment that can screen for more than 240 banned substances in less than 24 hours.

David Cowan, head of the Drug Control Centre at King's College London and the man overseeing London 2012's anti-doping regime, has said his team can screen up to 400 samples a day and expects to analyze around 6,250 in total during the Games.

"It is always a sad day when a cheating athlete is caught," IOC spokesman Mark Adams said on Saturday. "I hope there will not be more."

(Editing by Jason Neely)

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Disabled Kids 4 Times More Likely to Suffer Violence: Study

HealthDay – 1 hr 2 mins ago WEDNESDAY, July 11 (HealthDay News) -- One in four children with disabilities experiences some form of violence during their lifetime, a new study has found.

In the report, published online July 11 in The Lancet, researchers from the United Kingdom said that the risk of physical, sexual or emotional abuse or neglect for these children is nearly four times greater than for children who are not disabled.

"The impact of a child's disability on their quality of life is very much dependent on the way other individuals treat them," one of the study authors, Mark Bellis of Liverpool John Moores University in England, said in a journal news release.

"This research establishes that the risk of violence to children with disabilities is routinely three to four times higher than that of nondisabled children. It is the duty of government and civil society to ensure that such victimization is exposed and prevented," Bellis added.

For the study, the investigators examined 17 previous studies involving more than 18,000 children from the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, Spain and Israel. Most of the children were between the ages of 2 and 18 years.

The analysis revealed that nearly 27 percent of the children with disabilities had suffered some form of violence, including physical, sexual or emotional abuse or neglect. The study authors noted that lifetime levels of physical violence and sexual violence were high (20 percent and 14 percent, respectively).

The researchers also estimated that children with disabilities are at least three times more likely to be exposed to physical violence and nearly three times more likely to be exposed to sexual violence compared to children without disabilities.

Kids with mental or intellectual deficits are at greater risk for sexual abuse than children with other types of disabilities or no disabilities at all, the authors noted. However, there wasn't enough information to determine the risk for exposure to sexual violence of children with other types of disabilities, they pointed out.

Dr. Etienne Krug, director of the World Health Organization's department of violence and injury prevention and disability, which contributed to the study, commented in the news release: "The results of this review prove that children with disabilities are disproportionately vulnerable to violence, and their needs have been neglected for far too long. We know that specific strategies exist to prevent violence and mitigate its consequences. We now need to determine if these also work for children with disabilities. An agenda needs to be set for action."

The study authors added that children with disabilities living in developing nations could be at particular risk for exposure to violence.

"Estimates are missing for most regions of the world, particularly low-income and middle-income countries. This is a fundamental gap that needs to be addressed because these countries generally have higher population rates of disability, higher levels of violence and fewer support services than do high-income countries," explained Bellis.

Emily Lund and Jessica Vaughn-Jensen from Texas A&M University, authors of an accompanying comment in The Lancet, concluded in the news release that "researchers need to target under-represented disability groups . . .

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Longer sleep times may counteract genetic factors related to weight gain

ScienceDaily (May 1, 2012) — Toss out another old wives' tale: Sleeping too much does not make you fat. Quite the opposite, according to a new study examining sleep and body mass index (BMI) in twins, which found that sleeping more than nine hours a night may actually suppress genetic influences on body weight.

See Also:Health & MedicineObesitySleep Disorder ResearchDiet and Weight LossMind & BrainSleep DisordersInsomniaObstructive Sleep ApneaLiving WellReferenceCircadian rhythm sleep disorderOverweightBody mass indexSleep deprivation

The study looked at 1,088 pairs of twins and found that sleeping less than seven hours a night was associated with both increased BMI and greater genetic influences on BMI. Previous research has shown that genetic influences include things like glucose metabolism, energy use, fatty acid storage and satiety. In this study, the heritability of BMI was twice as high for the short sleepers than for twins who slept longer than nine hours a night.

"The results suggest that shorter sleep provides a more permissive environment for the expression of obesity related genes," said principal investigator Nathaniel Watson, MD, MSc, of the University of Washington. "Or it may be that extended sleep is protective by suppressing expression of obesity genes."

Watson and colleagues determined that for twins sleeping less than seven hours, genetic influences accounted for 70 percent of the differences in BMI, with common environment accounting for just 4 percent and unique environment 26 percent. For twins averaging more than nine hours of sleep, genetic factors were attributed to 32 percent of weight variations, with common environment accounting for 51 percent and unique environment 17 percent.

More research is needed, Watson said, but these preliminary results may suggest that behavioral weight loss measures would be most effective when genetic drivers of body weight are mitigated through sleep extension.

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