TAMUCC professor concerned over growing steroid use
January 8, 2007
CORPUS CHRISTI - A professor at A&M University – Corpus Christi is growing concerned about the steroid use in the high school ranks in the Coastal Bend. Don Melrose hears the stories, and he has learned that steroids are growing increasingly dangerous for unimaginable reasons.
Melrose said he thinks steroid education is missing the mark down here. Sure, it tells the kids about liver and heart disease, and brain cancer. But now, the black market is loaded with counterfeit steroids, stuff you can get off the Internet. And high school athletes are ignorent of the risks involved.
"The more likely that we're dealing with a counterfeit or a fake. If we're talking about something in pill form, it could be something from basic sugar to rat poison," Melrose, who has a Ph.d. exercise physiology, said. "If we're talking about something that is an injectable steroid, if it's a water base it could be just water. If it's an oil base, it could be just an oil base steroid, but it could, also, be what we've found in fakes for years, things like motor oil."
We all heard about the Mark McGwire stories. Today's pro athletes are rolling the dice. Steroids can enhance one's performance. However, they can also cause serious injuries that could force a player into early retirement.
"Very few people get out of this without injury, very few people without either injury or some kind of significant side effect," Melrose said, "but when that muscle strengthens so strictly over a tendon that's supposed to be many times stronger than a muscle, the muscle can contract, flex or stretch and pull that tendon directly off the bone."
Nationwide, Melrose said he believes up to a million high school athletes are on steroids. He's convinced it's happening here. Incoming students at A&M - Corpus Christi are always telling him about the local schools and the players that are on it. He won't mention names, but he knows who they are.
"Even the possibility that coaches have made them available to students in various ways, shapes or forms," he said. "That's the part that scares me more than anything. We have the same stories coming out of the same places all the time. That's really what scares me, locally, yes."
Although a few local high schools conduct steroid testing, Melrose said they may not be able to detect all the steroid drugs. That would be too costly.
The key, he said, is education, especially since we live so close to the border where much of the counterfeit market comes from.
