This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiata.

When he worked in a pharmacy in Portugal, Fernando Moreira

often encountered people who stopped by for performance enhancing drugs for their racing pigeons.

I saw it very often.

Pigeon racing is big business. A bird named Bolt, as in Usain, sold for nearly half a

million dollars a few years back.

So there's a big incentive to breed faster birds and to illegally obtain performance enhancing

drugs for them.

Some doctors make prescriptions that are supposedly for the humans, for the owners of the pigeons, and then the owners of the pigeons administer those drugs to the animals.

Marera says that the pigeon fancier says they're called freely admitted who the drugs were

really for. And though the drugs can cause heart attacks and the avian athletes, there wasn't much he could do about it.

We cannot prohibit them to buy these drugs because they have a prescription.

And so Marera headed to the University of Port to get his doctorate,

so he could figure out how to drug test pigeons and catch dopers in the act.

He and his team started by interviewing pigeon fanciers, anonymously about their drugs of choice,

so he'd know what to test for. They spiked pigeon poop with four popular

doping compounds, a beta blocker and three cortico steroids, and devised a test that uses mass

spectrometry to quantify them. Then in a more real world scenario

they doped two pigeons with a corticosterroid and successfully use their method to

screen the bird's feces, a test that still works as many as three days after the pigeon is drugged.

The results are in the Journal of Chromatography B.

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