Testing for Cow Doping

The alleged practice involves injecting a cow’s udder with a silver protein to plump up the skin, making it more appealing to judges at agricultural fairs.

In order to discourage this, NSERC researcher Dr. Joanne O’Meara has developed a method to detect trace amounts of silver protein in a cow’s udder.

The physicist was approached by colleague Dr. Howard Dobson, from the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph, to develop this method. Dr. O’Meara, an expert in measuring heavy metals like uranium, mercury and lead, says she was up for the challenge. She enlisted the help of NSERC scholar Sean Graham and built a system involving an iodine-125 source and a solid-state detector to find the silver.

“The preliminary experiments have been very encouraging. Now we need to make it more portable,” she says.

Dr. O’Meara is also looking into human applications for her technique. After prolonged exposure to high amounts of ingested or inhaled silver, humans may develop argyria, which makes the skin permanently turn bluish-grey. She hopes to develop a screening system for people exposed to silver to prevent them from reaching the levels of exposure associated with argyria.