South Africa? South Africa? Oh Snap!

It’s coming into focus now.

With doping its always 2-3 or 5 years down the line that it all makes sense. Of course, by that time, the products have been tipped into the urinal, or in one special case, down the sink.

We learn from this article, some little facts about HemoPure.

I remember some bee lining to South Africa by a certain Team named _______, how about you?

At the time the drug was approved for human use in South Africa only, and like a honeypot there was a beeline there for ‘training’ purposes. Hmmmm.

Hemopure was on the Australian Institute of Sports researchers ‘hit list’ of drugs back in 2001 to be investigated before the Australian Government banned their project despite already having WADA funding to develop tests. But that’s another story.

Hemopure is an oxygen based therapeutic drug derived from chemically stabilized bovine (cow) hemoglobin. It has been developed for potential use in humans as a substitute for blood. A similar product from BioPure — Oxyglobin – was released earlier for veterinary use to treat anemia in dogs (so anyone ‘cocking’ their leg since 2001 while giving a urine test would be suspected of using Oxyglobin!)

Hemopure is stable at room temperature and does not require blood typing which offers great advantages over traditional blood doping by transfusion because human blood needs to be constantly refrigerated, typed before infusion and screened for infectious diseases. There is great potential for harm due to incorrect blood typing and transmission of infectious diseases such as mad cow disease both of which can cause organ failure and death in some cases.

Hemopure carries the same amount of oxygen as the hemoglobin in red blood cells. However, these linked hemoglobin molecules circulate in plasma, and are smaller, have lower viscosity (resistance to flow) and more readily release oxygen to tissues than red blood cells. Consequently, they can carry oxygen at low blood pressure and can carry oxygen through constricted or partially blocked blood vessels to areas of the body that red blood cells cannot reach due to their larger size.

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13 thoughts on “South Africa? South Africa? Oh Snap!

  1. why that’s a fine milker you have there John,
    I give it a 50% shot that one of the key docs in the HemoPure trials in S. Africa has some sort of interesting connection to cycling.
    Look at this little heifer right here! He’s gonna grow up and be a fine uphill bull!
    Why in fact, BarloBull as the last team selected for this years Tour, has two stage wins!

    Now all we need is the Texas Tour of HemoPure!

    It will be like the Amgen Tour of California, only a bit faster! HemoPure is a small enough molecule to get to muscles regular blood just can’t! HemoPure, the quicker-hill picker upper!

  2. I found this: ““Hemopure’s half-life is 24 hours,” Mueller said. “That means the body starts getting rid of it in two days.”


    Question: I thought “half life” meant “half gone”? As in “The half-life of a quantity, subject to exponential decay, is the time required for the quantity to decay to half of its initial value”

    If the half life is 24 hours, how can it be that the body starts to get rid of it in two days? Sounds more like body starts getting rid of it quite quickly, and half of it is gone in the first 24 hours. I’d be surprised if there was much of anything left after 48 hours.

    I guess you take this stuff the morning of your race? You can’t very well take it the day, or night, before with a half life of only 24 hours.

    But, it fits in a shoebox and can be stored at room temperature. Gotta love that in a doping product.

  3. Barlowing. It’s all starting to make sense now.

    People ask me what I’m on. I tell them a barstool; six hours a day……

  4. OK

    Half life is the time it would take for 50% of a quantity to degrade/disappear/digest/etc.

    If a half-life of something is 24 hours, let’s say you start with 10mg, you’ll have 5mg left after 24h. 2.5mg after 48h. 1.25mg after 72 hours, 0.6125mg after 96hours….

    In less than a week – its gone from your system perhaps? Or at leat in such a small quantity it cannot be detected…


    Big Jonny – it may be that the body takes 24h to START to breakdown or clear the Hemopure from the the system – from there the half-life clock starts ticking…

  5. So, it is incorrect to say …” the body starts getting rid of it in two days.”

    The body starts getting rid of it in the fist day, and within 24 hours, half of it is gone.

    And by the end of 48 hours, 50% + approx another 25% of the total (or ~ 75%) is gone as well.

  6. This also indicates that it would be less than optimal as a doping agent since it must be injected repeatedly to have an effect. If the body is destroying the substance from the outset, it’s likely limited to a day or two of effectiveness at best. Purportedly once the IOC found out about this there was a straightforward screening test within a short while (2002-3 timeframe comes to mind). At any rate, the main attraction of blood doping to Basso, Ullrich, and the rest of their Puerto brethren was that it’s effects last quite a while, the stuff is your own stuff and therefore hard to detect (unless you mess up like Floyd and get some leftovers in the soup). I just can’t see anyone getting away with this stuff in the modern age of testing. 2002 sure – but not now.

  7. I remember another product similar to this SEVERAL years back in relation to lance Armstrong. Actovegin.

    I remember how a couple of French journalists decided to tail some of the USPS team workers. One day, they followed a worker who removed a trash bag and then drove a team car 60 miles into the countryside, he got out of the car and deposited the trash bag in some random person’s trash can. They waited for the guy to leave and then they found several discarded bags of Actovegin in addition to bloody gauze as well as discarded insulin. Presumably to elimiate their doping garbage in a manner that would not be easily discovered. I remember looking this drug up and finding that it was an experimental veterinary drug of the same sort of hemopure. I guess the boys are willing to inject some weird shit into their bods.

  8. And guys, the reason that most guys do not test positive anyways is that they use the dope in the 2- weeks leading up to the tour. Then they let it all metabolize out of their systems just in time for drug testing. This is why they are so pissed that they could not find Rasmussen. He was in Mexico packing-in the EPO from the pharmacias and training hard in the mountains. a restful week before the tour and all that crap is out of his system again.