Cobalt Threshold Decision Pending

By T.D. Thornton 
Cobalt abuse has dominated racing's doping headlines for the better part of a year, and North American regulators have been portrayed as slow to come up with uniform Thoroughbred and Standardbred rules to combat its use an alleged performance enhancer. 

Part of the perceived lag has to do with the fact that racing commissioners must rely on evidence-based science to document harms before enacting drug rules. Dopers, on the other hand, don't wait for the results of rigorous, peer-reviewed studies before administering questionable substances to horses in their quest for an illicit edge. 

But standardized threshold levels and penalties for cobalt are expected to be announced Thursday by the Association of Racing Commissioners International (RCI), even though the properties and mechanisms of the drug are not completely understood. 

The topic is the chief morning agenda item at the final session of the three-day Conference on Equine Welfare and Anti-Doping Policy in Tampa. Interviews with key conference participants indicate that the only strong point of agreement is that everyone involved is under the gun to get cobalt regulations on the books. 

“I intend to leave Tampa with a recommended regulatory policy for all the commissions in North America,” RCI president Ed Martin told TDN. “You're going to see us tackle cobalt. There is a real disagreement in the scientific community about what cobalt does and at what levels and what the science currently tells us. That doesn't mean we don't know enough to sort through what a regulatory policy should be.” 

Dr. Dionne Benson, DVM, the executive director and chief operating officer for the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium, heads the board that has been tasked with providing the scientific analysis to the RCI rule makers. She said the RMTC recommendations on cobalt that will up for debate on Thursday call for a two-tier penalty system. The goal is not to penalize too stringently for accidental overages that might occur through nutritional supplementation while coming down harder on obvious attempts to blood-dope. 

“Honestly I have no idea,” Benson said when asked how the RCI will react to the RMTC recommendations. “I can tell you that I'm very confident and comfortable with the recommendation that we've made. I think it's a good recommendation and a solid recommendation. It's up to the RCI to enact what they want.”

Examining how cobalt works and tracing back the doping timeline over the last several years reveals the reasons for urgency as the scientists and regulators attempt to work together–sometimes testily–in trying to establish industry-wide standards. 

In humans, cobalt stimulates the production of red blood cells (erythropoiesis). Increased red blood cell production leads to better oxygenation of the blood and, consequently, better endurance and decreased muscle fatigue. 

This effect is presumed to occur in other mammals, but it has not been definitively proven to work when horses are fed cobalt chloride (powdered cobalt “salts”). In addition, no research has been done to quantify other physiological effects of cobalt on horses with regard to cardiac output and muscle function, so dopers who administer it to horses are banking on anecdotal evidence that it works as a performance enhancer. 

What is known is that when administered in abundance, the bluish, metallic trace element is toxic to both humans and animals, causing organ damage, impaired thyroid activity and goiter formation. 

Dr. Mary Scollay, DVM, equine medical director for the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission (KHRC), has conducted research that shows when horses are a given doses of cobalt higher than 200 mg (some dopers have been alleged to administer more than that amount, but 200 mg is still about 100 times more than what would be fed in a nutritional supplement), it induces profuse sweating, muscle trembling, restless circling, brief periods of collapse, and interferes with the clotting mechanism of blood. 

While tests were being developed for synthetic blood doping (EPO) in the 1990s, it remained an underground secret in the racing world that jurisdictions didn't test for cobalt, which was cheaper to administer and allegedly produced similar performance enhancement. Its abuse was under the radar until about 2013, when cobalt use seemingly exploded on backstretches everywhere. 

Researchers in California began a comprehensive study to determine the effects of cobalt, and by September 2014, Indiana became the first state to adopt an emergency racing commission rule banning cobalt levels above 25 ppb in Thoroughbreds under penalty of up to a one-year suspension. 

In October, the RMTC's Scientific Advisory Committee failed to reach a consensus on thresholds when it met, partially because the board was waiting for additional data (that allegedly has still not been provided) from a separate study funded by the United States Trotting Association (USTA). 

In January, Benson told TDN that about $50,000 had been spent on cobalt research without any definitive guidelines coming out of the studies. 

By March, with cobalt routinely making alarming headlines in the racing press worldwide, North American regulators were facing increased pressure to respond to its abuse. On Mar. 19, the RCI issued a pre-emptive press release in which Martin predicted that “regulators would act to set in motion a ban on intentional cobalt administrations out of equine welfare concerns” at the Tampa convention. 

One week later, Mar. 26, the RMTC advisory committee finally came to a consensus and released recommended guidelines, which read: 

•Horses that test above 25 parts per billion (ppb) of cobalt in plasma shall be: (i) subject to a fine or a warning for the first offense; (ii) placed on the veterinarian's list; and (iii) ineligible to race until they test below 25 ppb of cobalt in plasma (at the owner's cost); and 

•Horses that test above 50 ppb of cobalt in plasma shall be subject to a class B penalty which in most jurisdictions includes: (i) disqualification of the horse; (ii) a fine; and (iii) trainer suspension. 

What will happen Thursday when the RCI Drug Testing Standards and Practices Committee discusses the majority and dissenting opinions on these guidelines is anybody's guess. The recommendations could be batted around like a pinata or adopted wholeheartedly with little dissention. 

“The RMTC has made a proposal to us. I don't know if that proposal will be accepted, changed or modified. I don't know how that will play out, but it certainly will be assessed and possibly debated,” Martin said. 

“I voted in support of the RMTC recommendation that ultimately came out of our last meeting for the tiered thresholds and penalty structures,” Scollay said. “It is based on extensive data and I am very comfortable with it, and I would hope that the RCI would choose to adopt that.” 

Racing commissions in individual states don't have to wait for the RCI and RMTC to agree on guidelines about drug rules before implementing their own standards, but most do. Scollay told TDN in January that the KHRC was waiting for the RMTC to establish parameters before acting on cobalt. In contrast, Apr. 16, the California Horse Racing Board unanimously approved moving forward with establishing violation and penalty guidelines for the presence of cobalt in an official blood sample. Those rules could go into effect as early as June (California already has a separate Standardbred guideline that requires horses testing higher than 25 ppb to be put on the vet's list until the animal clears its system of cobalt). 

One bone of contention that has been holding back a consensus are concerns from horsemen that routine cobalt supplementation will trigger positive tests. 

“Our approach is to be more conservative [in terms of penalizing for supplementation overages],” Martin said. “But if somebody does something that potentially endangers the horse, I think there's a feeling among our members that you've got to give them a pretty harsh penalty.” 

Dr. Rick Arthur, DVM, the RMTC secretary and equine medical director for the CHRB, said he doesn't buy the “accidental overage” argument. 

“This proposal is designed to protect the health and welfare of the racehorse,” Arthur said. “The recommended thresholds provide generous allowances for vitamin and mineral supplementation but make the administration of cobalt salts impractical. Importantly, the 25 ppb total cobalt threshold in blood is comparable to the 100-200 ppb thresholds in urine being administered internationally.” 

Another issue is whether or not regulators should publicly disclose the cobalt thresholds that trigger penalties. 
“There is also a debate going on over do you publicly say what your threshold is, and that's an interesting debate,” Martin explained. He said the Hong Kong Jockey Club simply classifies cobalt as a “prohibited practice,” and that New York recently instituted a 10-year ban for cobalt dopers (in harness racing only) with no published threshold level. 
“So you've got a real difference of opinion as to how you handle this, and we've got to sort this out,” Martin said. 
Benson said she backs the disclosure of threshold levels. 

“In the United States we've had a history of giving our threshold information; giving what the number is,” Benson said. “I don't anticipate there will be a departure from that procedure.” 

And what if the RCI deviates from the RMTC's two-tier system of 25 and 50 ppb entirely? For example, the above-referenced USTA study recommended a 70 ppb threshold. 

“If there's a different threshold [from what the RMTC recommends], I'm not sure what the basis for that would be,” Benson said. “If there is a different threshold that comes out of this, I think you will see more divisiveness.” 

Martin said differences of opinion among scientists, veterinarians and regulators shouldn't be taken as a sign that the system is not working. And, he noted, regardless of what the eventual RCI recommendation is, the commissioners in individual states still have to act on making sure those guidelines get adopted in their own jurisdictions. 

“It doesn't mean reasonable people cannot disagree,” Martin said. “But at the end of the day, when we recommend a uniform policy to the regulatory agencies, it would be helpful if the industry got behind that and aggressively pushed to see that it works its way through the various state government processes. There are some people who would like to absolve themselves at that level and just sit back in judgment of it all, but it's like anything else: To get the right government policy you have to give it a little push.”