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Monday, Jan. 12, 2009

Red Mile's doping protocol doubted

Four trainers accused of giving their horses illegal blood-doping drugs were stripped of entry fees, booted from races and, they allege, maligned in the eyes of the harness racing world apparently solely on the basis of a screening test.

The Red Mile, a harness track in Lexington, last fall told the trainers that four of their horses had tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs known generally as "EPO."

But subsequent testing, performed at the expense of the trainers, determined the horses were negative for both recombinant human erythropoietin and for Darbepoetin-alpha, although two samples had some similarities to the drugs.

The four trainers sued the track last week in Fayette Circuit Court, alleging defamation, saying that the track did not follow Kentucky Horse Racing Commission testing protocols.

AIT, the Indianapolis lab that performed the original testing, said it told the track the test results were "presumptive" positives only.

"We and Neogen (the maker of the testing kits) recommend that you do not base any decision on these positives," Raquel Bahamonde, AIT spokeswoman, said in an interview last month. "The Red Mile chose to take action based on these presumptive positives ... We do not recommend it, and they knew it. ... Had they waited they would have found these were negative. We did not mess up these tests. The Red Mile chose to not follow the process."

Joe Costa, president and CEO of The Red Mile, said last week that that precaution was not communicated beforehand.

"No, they made no comment as to our conduct," Costa said of the lab. "If anything, we were given an indication the (type of) test used was 99 percent certain as to its quality. They were chosen for their quality and for their turnaround time."

Calls to Neogen were not returned.

The kits used, a common type of test known as enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays or ELISAs, are both quick and inexpensive, two things Costa said are essential to fighting EPO. The tests cost $38 to $70 each and results were available within days, compared with the more in-depth testing done later in Pennsylvania that cost $1,500 per sample, and results took more than a month.

The incident illustrates some of the difficulties that horse racing faces as it attempts to clean up its image and combat potentially dangerous drug use.

Although state vets drew the blood samples, the drug testing was done at the behest of the racetrack, rather than the state racing commission. The track notified trainers before its high-profile Grand Circuit meet that it would conduct "out-of-competition" testing for EPO, a move that was widely supported by harness racing trainers and horse owners.

The track required consent waivers allowing horses to be tested as part of general stall lease agreements, but the consent forms don't spell out specifically what kind of tests would be used.

Kentucky does not conduct out-of-competition testing, although it has been proposed. Instead, state regulators rely on standard post-race drug tests. EPO enhances red-blood cell production for weeks, increasing a horse's stamina, but the drugs can be detected for only a few days after they are given.

Dr. Mary Scollay, equine medical director for the racing commission, said that Kentucky uses ELISA for screening as well, but would turn to the other type of testing before taking action.

"The way our system works, we require confirmation testing on any sample before we call a positive," Scollay said. "If the screening is done by ELISA, you have to have confirmation by a different method. ... The idea is that before we would call a positive, we would want the substance to be detected by two different methods."

Dr. Cornelius Uboh, program director of the Pennsylvania lab that conducted the confirmation testing, said that is considered standard. "You wouldn't call a positive on an ELISA screening. ... It's just a prediction. You have to take it beyond that point to confirm the suspicion. ... You could not take that to court. It would not have legs to stand on."