Endurance drug may pass Olympic tests

London -- A leading anti-doping expert told the BBC that a blood-boosting endurance drug may go undetected by testing labs working with the upcoming Beijing Olympics.

University of Copenhagen Professor Bengt Saltin says new testing criteria could allow use of the drug erythropoietin and its many copycats to escape detection, the BBC reported Monday.

The BBC says the problem harks back to 2004 when the World Anti-Doping Agency tightened the criteria by which an EPO positive could be declared. The number of athletes prosecuted for EPO use declined by two-thirds from 2003-06, the BBC found.

Danish researchers recently set out to test how well EPO is detected under the new criteria by sending two labs more than 100 urine samples from eight student volunteers who were medicated with the drug over a period of weeks.

One of the WADA-approved labs declared none of the samples positive.

Copyright 2008 by United Press International.