EU joins international effort in fight against doping in sport
The European Union is to be involved in a new project, CAFDIS, to be launched on 1 March, which is aimed at fighting doping in sport through gathering and disseminating anti-doping information to a larger audience. The project is a Concerted Action under the Growth Programme of the European Commission's Fifth Framework programme, and will receive over 800,000 euro from the European Commission. The project's five partners will be the Irish Olympic Council, the IOC (International Olympic Committee) in Athens, the French CNOSF (Comité National Olympique et Sportif Français), the Italian CONI (Comitato Olimpico Nazionale Italiano) and the International Sport Federation of Cycling (UCI). EC personnel, along with all EC National Olympic Committees (NOCs) and core partners will participate in biannual meetings, where the development of the tools and the provision of information will be evaluated. The project will result in a website on research and development on anti-doping, laboratory matters, education, ethics and future trends in doping. The information contained in the website will be informative for those involved in the fight against doping in sport, including athletes themselves, sports administrators, coaches and managers and laboratory personnel, arbitrators, medical personnel, pharmaceutical industries and the police authorities. Research and development on (anti) doping in sport is on-going within the EU. Results from these projects as well as from research outside the EU will be collected and made available to agencies and researchers in order to improve understanding of the problem and avoid multiple funding. One such EU project is ISOTRACE (detection of illegal drugs by isotope ratio mass spectrometry: improvement of sensitivity, widening of applicability and development of tests and reference data), funded under the Growth programme of the European Commission's Fifth Framework programme. Work on ISOTRACE began in March 2000, is due to end in March 2003 and involves eight partners from six Member States. The project aims to increase the sensitivity of Isotope ratio mass spectrometry, a definitive tool for drug detection, enabling it to detect some of the recent abused compounds by measuring their carbon 13 content, and to expand the applicability by measuring hydrogen content as a new diagnostic test. It is hoped that the EU's involvement in CAFDIS will raise the EU's profile in the fight against doping, thus increasing its potential to influence policies and decisions in the world and at continental level.