BREAKTHROUGH BY PUPILS MAY FOIL DRUG TEST CHEATS

TWO schoolgirls have made an important breakthrough in the fight against
the misuse of drugs in sport and the workplace while on placement with a
hospital.

A series of experiments by the 17-year-old pupils has pinpointed ways in
which people try to disguise drug-taking by tampering with samples for
analysis.

Readily available chemicals, such as contact lens solutions, have been used
to spike samples, but tests carried out by Judith Watts and Laura Armstrong
have been able to confirm when this adulteration has happened.

Further research is planned at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary where the girls
made their discovery while on work experience.

Dr Bill Selway, their teacher at Aberdeen Grammar School, said the research
could have significant impact on catching out drug cheats. He said:
"Machines could be developed in the future which would tell right away
whether samples had been adulterated."

The research was carried out as part of the girls' sixth-year chemistry
project. With drug testing becoming more common in the workplace, their
remit was to prove that current testing for drugs was far from infallible.

Judith said: "We started out with theories we had heard based on poppy-seed
cake producing a positive urine result suggesting opiates had been taken.

"So we ate lots of poppy seeds - around 10gm of them, which wasn't that
nice - but we didn't get very conclusive results ourselves because we
couldn't keep ourselves in a strict laboratory situation,"Judith added.

But the urine contamination experiments proved far more successful, with
the girls spiking synthesised drug samples with sodium hydrochloride and
hydrogen peroxide.

Laura said: "We used various concentrations of the different solutions of
the household products to spike the urine samples. We then found by machine
analysis that the hydrochloride did affect all the drugs we screened, apart
from the barbiturates.

"Using this analysis, we looked at absorbencies and noted whether they were
what you would, or would not, expect them to be."

The girls tested the PH balance of a normal urine and discovered how levels
became particularly low when the samples had been adulterated.

Laura and Judith also found there were other indicators, such as changes in
the density of liquids when they were tampered with.

Their project is to be followed up at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, and there
are plans for a paper on the findings.