Health council to address issue of doping
Nicole Maréchal, the Minister of Health for the French community in Belgium and current chair of the EU's Health council met with Bernard Kouchner, France's Minister of Health Secretary of State for Health on 18 July, where the two highlighted the issue of doping as a priority for the next Health council. A number of projects researching doping in sport have already been funded under the Fifth Framework programme following a report requested by the European Commission and published in 1999, which stressed the need for further research into measurement and testing technologies as well as coordination and education. In March 2001, a concerted action under the Growth Programme, CAFDIS, which will gather and disseminate anti doping information to a wider audience was launched. The project will receive over 800,000 euro from Community funds. ISOTRACE (detection of illegal drugs by isotope ration mass spectrometry; improvement of sensitivity, widening of applicability and development of tests and reference data) is an EU project involving eight partners from six Member States. The project will end in March 2003, by which time, the consortium hopes to have increased the sensitivity of Isotope ration mass spectrometry, a drug detection tool, thus enabling it to detect some of the recently abused compounds by measuring their carbon 13 content.