Originally Posted by
furiousferret
If its just straight blood doping and nothing else 'external' it seems awfully hard to catch someone in the act; the numbers can look better and suspect but it seems like someone could talk their way out of it (I slept well, my numbers always go in after X days of racing). I'm not sure if there's a definitive test tho catch blood doping (dead cell percentage, etc) but it doesn't seem like an easy task.
If the manipulation is recent you can detect it by looking for juvenile red blood cells. The number of "baby" cells (reticulocytes) goes up after extraction and down after re-infusion as the body up or down regulates new blood cell production.