testing lab | Horse Racing Free Tips

Cornell University will repurpose part of its Veterinary College to help with COVID-19 testing. Cornell received approval from New York State to repurpose their Animal Health Diagnostic Center into an on-campus viral testing lab for students.

The program was implemented to reduce pressure on other testing sites. The program at Cornell is designed to test people when they arrive on campus, as well as to test people who feel ill or who have been exposed to COVID-19. This testing will be done in addition to surveillance testing; all testing will be done in collaboration with Cayuga Medical Center and Tompkins County Health Department.

It was noted that Cornell has a low prevalence of COVID-19 on campus: 0.2 percent of those tested have been positive for COVID-19. This is significantly lower than the 1.1 percent of people in New York who have tested positive.

Cornell plans to use the lab to test students once or twice per week. It is unclear if the lab will test people who are not students at the University. If students test positive for COVID-19, the university will work with the Tompkins County Health Department to assist with contact tracing and quarantining.

The nasopharyngeal swab will be used for arrival testing, but surveillance testing will use front-of-nostril samples. This type of testing is less invasive and can be used to test a high volume of samples quickly.

Read more at the Cornell Daily Sun.

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US racing commissions sent 263,783 biological samples from horses participating in professional horse races to the testing laboratories.

Of those tests there were 1,461 adverse analytical findings accounting for 0.55 percent of all samples. 99.45 percent of samples tested were clear, indicating a high degree of compliance with anti-doping and medication rules based upon known information and data..

Of the adverse analytical findings, approximately three percent were clear attempts at doping as the substance detected had no reason to be present in the horse other than to provide a maximum enhancement of performance. Class 2 substances considered the next most serious level of substances that can affect performance accounted for 6.09 percent of all findings. Class 1 and Class 2 substances are generally considered “doping” and together they account for 9.03 percent of all 2019 detections.

As in prior years, the overwhelming substance detections (69.75 percent) involved therapeutic medications (Class 4 and 5 substances) that may affect performance to a lesser extent, but are still not permitted to be present in a horse when it races. With the exception of race day furosemide to mitigate or prevent bleedings, horse racing does not permit use of these substances with a therapeutic use exemption as defined in the World Anti-Doping Code.

21.83 percent of the detections involved Class 3 substances. These have a greater ability to affect performance and contain substances which may be therapeutic as well as those that might indicate a deliberate attempt to cheat.

This information represents the official testing results from all horse racing US jurisdictions, except Maine which did not respond to repeated requests for information.

Like the testing results in human and Olympic sport, these numbers should not lessen the resolve of the sport and its regulators to pursue substances that the labs are unable to test for. This is an ongoing challenge for the anti-doping programs in all professional sport and underscores the need for intelligence based efforts in this regard as well as intelligence based out of competition testing.

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