China Capable of Using Blood Tests to Test for EPO

Zhang Changjiu, head of the National Sports Bureau Sports Medicine Research Institute and researcher at the Chinese Stimulant Testing Center, Tuesday said that China is fully capable of administering the blood test according to the erythropoietin (EPO) guidelines passed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the test results are reliable. EPO is a synthetic version of a naturally occurring hormone which stimulates the production of red blood cells.

Zhang said, for the past ten years, scientists from all over the world have been looking for a scientific method of testing EPO, but could not distinguish which EPOs were produced by the human body and which were from medicine. The IOC invested US$1 million and the Australian government invested A$1.5 million researching this problem. Recently, there was finally a breakthrough. The Executive Committee of the IOC formally passed the decision on August 29 to use a combination of blood tests and urine tests to test for EPOs in the Olympic.

China is one of the five countries, along with Australia, France, Canada and Norway working together to develop the EPO test. Dr. Wu Moutian, researcher at the National Sports Bureaus' Sports Medicine Research Institute and director of the Chinese Stimulant Testing Center, is one of the six members of the of the IOC Medicine Committee's Stimulant Subcommittee.

Zhang also said that the Chinese Stimulant Testing Center has successively passed the examinations of IOA for eleven years and it is appointed spare lab for Sydney Olympic.

In response to a question about whether the level of EPO would increase after an athlete has trained in high altitudes would cause an erroneous test result, Xie Minhao, leader of the blood test team of the Chinese Stimulant Testing Center, said the international researchers collected large amounts of blood samples from people of different races and altitudes in fifteen countries and selected five indexes from almost one hundred indexes. Whether the increase in EPO was caused by training in high altitudes or by taking stimulants can be accurately determined based on the level of increase in the five indexes.



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