MEDICAL : 2 Medical Equipment Firms Donate Products to U.S. Olympic Athletes

The U.S. Olympic team has won the hearts of at least two Orange County medical equipment manufacturers.

Beckman Instruments, a Fullerton manufacturer of medical and scientific instruments, has donated to the United States swim team a $23,000 chemical analyzer that will be used to monitor the performance of future Olympic contestants at their training center in Colorado Springs, Colo.

John Hobbs, marketing manager for the Altex Division of Beckman in San Ramon that makes the analyzer, said the Olympic swim team requested a gift of the High Performance Liquid Chromatography System. It was shipped to Colorado Springs on Sept. 20.

Hobbs said the analyzer can detect a compound that becomes prevalent when swimmers train to excess and which causes a breakdown of muscle protein.

The U.S. swim team and other U.S. athletes at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul are using a wide variety of first aid supplies donated by Zee Medical, an Irvine distributor of first aid products.

A Zee Medical spokeswoman said that each of the 75 team members from the United States was given a personal Zee first aid kit. In all, she said, the company has donated 80 different products, including stretchers, resuscitators, thermometers and eye and ear protectors. She said that company president Dan Taylor was in Seoul earlier this week watching the games.