BioTechScreening Blog: Oral Fluid Testing

BioTechScreening Posting Page

Sunday, March 25, 2012

This is the one matrix that has made a significant impact on drug testing within the USA. In criminal justice, for example, the field continues to attract more females than males and when 90% of persons under supervision are male, an observed specimen collection becomes burdensome. Oral fluids provide a gender neutral observed specimen collection.

In addition, urine is susceptible to test tampering while oral fluids, with a few safeguards, seems virtually immune to this. Studies from the University of Maryland suggest that oral fluids are as accurate as urine in detecting drugs of abuse with the exception of marijuana. There is very little THC in oral fluids and the detection of this drug therefore becomes problematic.

Some drug tests on the market claim to detect this drug through a metabolite of marijuana, but there is so little of this that you will never get a positive for marijuana. One of the down sides of onsite oral fluid testing is that these tests do require a longer run time than their urine counterparts, they are more expensive and do not test for as many drugs.

Oral fluids has become very popular in the workplace in that rather than sending an employee or prospective employee to a clinic for a urine draw, which can be very expensive, an onsite nurse can conduct an oral fluid test.

Additionally, the vast majority of urine collections at clinics are unobserved which renders them susceptible to a wide variety of test tampering techniques including substitution, hydration and adulteration. In new hire situations this also enables a company to hire a prospect immediately instead of waiting several days for a result thus running the risk to losing that prospect to another company.

Finally, oral fluid testing does solve the problem of shy bladder syndrome.

Labels: gender, marijuana, oral_fluids, urine, workplace

by: BioTechScreening

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Blog Home