INQUIRER Sports

SYDNEY – (UPDATE) The World Anti-Doping Agency has said a new test for detecting human growth hormones will make it more difficult for athletes to cheat at this year's Beijing Olympics.

HGH, undetectable for most of the past 20 years, is believed to be one of the most-abused drugs in sport.

Anti-doping authorities have been working on a reliable test for more than a decade but it is only now being widely introduced, after limited programs were conducted at the 2004 Athens Olympics and Turin Winter Games in 2006.

WADA director general David Howman said every country with an accredited laboratory would receive the HGH-testing kits within months.

But Howman would not say exactly when the testing would begin because he did not want to inform drug cheats.

"Growth hormone is a big issue. It's being taken with impunity in some countries," Howman told reporters on Wednesday a day before a WADA meeting here to improve cooperation between anti-doping and law enforcement agencies.

Scientists, specializing in blood doping, have shown that athletes can take regular low doses of the blood-boosting hormone erythropoietin (EPO) in combination with insulin growth factor or HGH.

The combination, they have found, accelerates the impact of EPO but enables the user to escape detection for the smaller dose of EPO.

Howman said athletes using this method would now face a problem, as there would be a test for HGH at Beijing after difficulties with the HGH testing kits had been resolved.

Howman said WADA was also alert to the latest designer steroids, similar to tetrahydrogestrinone (THG), which was used by the BALCO clients such as disgraced American sprinter Marion Jones and Britain's Dwain Chambers.

WADA president John Fahey said the new technology was more effective than previous tests, which could only detect HGH within 24 hours of it being taken.

"There is certain news about certain drugs that allowed athletes to believe that if they cut it out in the days or the weeks leading up to the Games they could get away with it," Fahey told reporters. "They shouldn't be sure of that any more."

Fahey said laboratories could detect growth hormone taken "many days before" and that several hundred blood tests for HGH would be conducted in Beijing.

The two-day Sydney drug symposium will bring together law enforcement bodies, customs, immigration, Interpol and drug-testing agencies to strengthen links.

WADA said it was close to signing a memorandum of understanding with Interpol, the world's largest international police organization with 186 member countries, for information sharing.