i thought they had 10 days to make a decision which would have meant the 12th.... whats up?

i thought they had 10 days to make a decision which would have meant the 12th.... whats up?

from http://www.tylerhamilton.com/home1.html
"Normally a case closes when the hearing ends. However my case was fairly complicated given the amount of testimony provided. So, for a number of reasons, it is still officially open. Once it closes, the arbitrators will have ten days to write an opinion."

Hamilton is a top American rider and the Tour needs that wider appeal and those dollars. He is a huge fish in terms of the war on doping. Any new test can be contested when someone falls foul of it. Everyone involved needs to tread extremely carefully because what is at stake is potentially huge. No wonder they are taking their time, their decision has to be absolutely right and leave as few loopholes as possible.

Hamilton is a top American rider and the Tour needs that wider appeal and those dollars. He is a huge fish in terms of the war on doping. Any new test can be contested when someone falls foul of it. Everyone involved needs to tread extremely carefully because what is at stake is potentially huge. No wonder they are taking their time, their decision has to be absolutely right and leave as few loopholes as possible.

Does WADA fund the development of the new blood tests or are they from private companies? This case could decide where alot of money in dope control gets spent over the next decade. That certainly antagonizes the obvious financial interests of the pro tour.

this test was pre-existing and I don't know who funded it. I do know that it was Australian researchers who developed its application for sports - and who had their state funding cut, thus setting back their research by some margin.

this test was pre-existing and I don't know who funded it. I do know that it was Australian researchers who developed its application for sports - and who had their state funding cut, thus setting back their research by some margin.

According to the paper in Haematologica, "This research was supported by a grant from the United States Anti-Doping Agency. SIAB receives support from the World Anti-Doping Agency." SIAB is the "Science and Industry Against Blood-doping Research Consortium," which employs one of the authors.

I've said it before, but I can't resist repeating myself. Those aussies were a bunch of freakin' idiots because when they developed the test for sport application they never measured the false positive rate. In their scientific papers, instead of presenting measurements of false positive rates, they write that they guess the false positive rate is unlikely to be terribly high. No numbers. No measurements. Just a hunch, a guess, and a bunch of weasel words.

If I tried to publish stuff like that, I'd be laughed out of my department!

We now know that the false positive rate is almost certainly no more than a few percent because only two riders in the pro peloton tested positive, but I would really be much happier if WADA could produce scientific documentation that the false positive rate is less than one tenth of a percent. We routinely get that kind of accuracy with HIV tests and there is no good reason we should not strive for that sort of accuracy with drug tests.

Lots of people point out that these tests are used on pregnant women in hospitals all over the world, but in that application a false positive rate of several percent would not be cause for concern. There's a trade-off between false positives and false negatives. No one dies from a false positive, but in hospital people could die from a false negative, so the hospitals want to make damned sure they don't get false negatives, even if that choice increases the false-positive rate. On the other hand falsely accusing several percent of the pro peloton of doping would undermine WADA's credibility and make it harder to get rid of actual dopers.

I believe that Hamilton and Perez probably did dope, but I'm really annoyed that WADA is handling the cases in such an unprofessional way. If we're really going to get dopers out of the peloton we desparately need WADA to show us that it knows what the hell it's doing.

According to the paper in Haematologica, "This research was supported by a grant from the United States Anti-Doping Agency. SIAB receives support from the World Anti-Doping Agency." SIAB is the "Science and Industry Against Blood-doping Research Consortium," which employs one of the authors.

I've said it before, but I can't resist repeating myself. Those aussies were a bunch of freakin' idiots because when they developed the test for sport application they never measured the false positive rate. In their scientific papers, instead of presenting measurements of false positive rates, they write that they guess the false positive rate is unlikely to be terribly high. No numbers. No measurements. Just a hunch, a guess, and a bunch of weasel words.

If I tried to publish stuff like that, I'd be laughed out of my department!

We now know that the false positive rate is almost certainly no more than a few percent because only two riders in the pro peloton tested positive, but I would really be much happier if WADA could produce scientific documentation that the false positive rate is less than one tenth of a percent. We routinely get that kind of accuracy with HIV tests and there is no good reason we should not strive for that sort of accuracy with drug tests.

Lots of people point out that these tests are used on pregnant women in hospitals all over the world, but in that application a false positive rate of several percent would not be cause for concern. There's a trade-off between false positives and false negatives. No one dies from a false positive, but in hospital people could die from a false negative, so the hospitals want to make damned sure they don't get false negatives, even if that choice increases the false-positive rate. On the other hand falsely accusing several percent of the pro peloton of doping would undermine WADA's credibility and make it harder to get rid of actual dopers.

I believe that Hamilton and Perez probably did dope, but I'm really annoyed that WADA is handling the cases in such an unprofessional way. If we're really going to get dopers out of the peloton we desparately need WADA to show us that it knows what the hell it's doing.

my own experience with FC based assays are that they don't have the greatest signal to noise ratios either. even though i too think they are guilty as heck, the method used to catch them doesn't fill me with confidence. btw anyone who says the facs stuff works perfectly is lying or is a lab tech who has spent way too much time alone with the machine. that combined with the opacity of wada might give tyler enough breathing room (assuming his attorneys were good).

my own experience with FC based assays are that they don't have the greatest signal to noise ratios either. even though i too think they are guilty as heck, the method used to catch them doesn't fill me with confidence. btw anyone who says the facs stuff works perfectly is lying or is a lab tech who has spent way too much time alone with the machine.
Nicely put. In a lot of ways, what may be needed is something like the way HIV tests are often performed: ELISA, like FACS, is quite variable and has too great a tradeoff between sensitivity and specificify, so ELISA positives were run through a Western Blot to get high specificity. Perhaps WADA needs to use a high-specificity test for the B samples instead of just running them through the same FACS protocol.

Secret decoder ring for non-scientists:
FC = fluorescence cytometry (the method used to "catch" Hamilton and Perez.
FACS = fluorescence activated cell sorting: One way of doing FC, usually with an automated cell-sorting machine.
ELISA = enzyme-linked immunoscpecific assay (used to identify HIV antibodies. Very good at catching true HIV cases, but gave a lot of false positives, up to a few percent in some versions of the protocol);
Western Blot = a different test for HIV antibodies, which has a much lower false-positive rate (one tenth of a percent or less). If you screen ELISA positives with WB, your false-positive rate drops tremendously.
Sensitivity = probability that a true doper will test positive. A sensitivity of 99% means that you'll catch 99% of all the dopers you test.
Specificity = probability that someone not doping will test true negative. 100% - specificity gives you the probability that a non-doper will test false-positive, so a specificity of 99% means that 1% of the non-dopers will be falsely accused.

Usually there's a direct trade-off between sensitivity and specificity so making a test more sensitive means that you make it less specific and vice-versa. This is why, when you want both sensitivity and specificity you usually make two separate tests: a screening test to identify potential positives and a confirming test to weed out the false-positives.