Traditional Medicines @ Olympics 2008

Athletes will be able to use traditional Chinese medicines at next year's Olympics without risking positive dope tests if they take basic precautions, a Beijing organising committee (BOCOG) official said on Tuesday.

Dr. Dai Jianping, who state media quoted last week as saying traditional medicines would not be used, said all Chinese drugs were subject to the same regulatory standards as those from the West."There is no direct relation between Chinese traditional herbal medicine and doping," Dai, who is responsible for medical services at the Games, told reporters."It has been around for several thousand years and is very healthy for the body. Like Western medicines it can protect the body. It would be like saying vitamin C is a kind of doping."Dai said China's drug administration had to approve all traditional medicines and, as in other countries, the ingredients were analysed and listed on packaging."After the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) announces the banned list, we select those that can be used and those that can't," he said.

Chinese coach Ma Junren, whose long-distance runners broke several world records in the early 1990s, said his charges used traditional products such as turtle blood to help them achieve their fast times.

Trivia # 2

The Dead Sea is so called because of the high salt content of its waters. That spells instant death for fish that happen to wander in, as they occasionally do from the Jordan River. In fact it kills most animal and plant life--with the exception of tourists, who love the property of the salt water that makes it so easy to float on.

Bacteria survive in the Dead Sea, though, as do brine shrimp and a class of plants called halophytes that love salt water. So it's not entirely dead, although not exactly a wild and crazy place, either.


(Sources: The Handy Science Answer Book)

Trivia # 1

How are enormously heavy steel ships able to float?

They appear to defy basic laws of nature. But in fact, they're obeying a law of nature, buoyancy, which Greek mathematician Archimedes reportedly discovered while taking a bath. The trick in building ships so that they don't go straight to the bottom is to get the shape right. The vessel has to be configured so that it will be buoyant, displacing a volume of water weighing as much as it does. In other words, if an amount of steel equal to that in a giant tanker were rolled into a compact ball and dropped into the sea, bye, bye ball. But if the metal is spread out over a thousand feet, the ship can cross the ocean.