There are also several problems with your “review”.
Note that “twoggle” wrote the piece on the strength of the CAS Media Release, without the benefit of the details in the 44-page report. It should not surprising to anyone that some points would need updating based on new information previously not available.
I would agree that 40% does seem “sensational” given the small sample size of 5. (BTW, small sample sizes seems to be a general issue with much of the anti-doping research.)
But surely you are smart enough to see that “false positive” in the sense of an IRMS test is a false determination of “exogenous” versus “endogenous” (using WADA’s broadened definition), especially after reading the details and argument in the piece.
Are we talking about “meat being from commercial pigs "with largely corn-based diet"? The AIU and CAS talked about it, but this looked to me like unconfirmed assumptions from the AIU and its experts, based on national statistics, ignoring changes in diet during the pandemic to increased quantities of soy, which would alter the IRMS results.
I would agree that there is a question — that is one of the changes made possible with the benefit of the 44-page CAS report published.
Note that a majority of the panel agreed the WADA lab followed the 2021 process, meaning that at least a minority agreed that the A and B samples should have followed the path of the process that can only lead to a “negative” or an ATF result.
This confirms that there is a question, at the very least among CAS arbiters, of how to properly apply the TD2021NA to Houlihan’s samples.
It does seem highly questionable that the changes from 2019 to 2021 related specifically to boar consumption, can be completely ignored by the WADA labs, at their discretion, and still be considered within the process. This suggests to me an ambiguity in the document that must be clarified by WADA in a TD2022NA.
It is not the AIU, but WADA that should realize the ambiguity, as demonstrated by the split opinion of the arbiters, and clarify their guidance.
Why would you say “not kidney, etc.”? Was this documented somewhere?
I would agree that 5.2-5.8 is not likely to come from meat, but from the higher concentrations found in organs like kidney, liver, heart, testes, etc. (I haven’t seen any table regarding stomach).
Then the quantities would not need to be so much, as little as 5-10 grams, e.g. in chorizo, or chopped up and mixed in with the other ingredients.
Let’s not forget that this is editiorial opinion — the discerning reader can decide to take this section for what it is worth, or not.
Just the same, they are well reasoned opinions also backed up by studies and logical arguments.
Sub-lingual (and anal) are alternate ways to bypass the first-pass filtering of the liver with oral ingestion, and would be comparable to injection if not indistinguishable.
It’s hard for me to see why you think these alternatives are interesting, or that an editorial opinion piece should be that exhaustive.
Twoggle gave two peer-reviewed reasons why it doesn’t make sense to chose oral with less benefits — peer-reviewed reasons finding no benefits from small doses.
Actually twoggle did mention more than once contamination of supplements and medicines. There is no need to specifically suggest “testo cream” contamination to help make the point, particularly if we can consider testo-cream as medicine.