Random Drug Screening
Alpha Biolabs offers a centralised workplace and bespoke forensic drug analysis service providing you with a flexible, high quality, confidential, professional service. Our service gives you high integrity, legally defensible drug screening and confirmation analysis on hair, urine, oral fluid (saliva) samples. Quality and customer satisfaction are our priorities in all of our activities. Using our depth of experience in the field of drug testing, we offer end to end solutions for all our clients to ensure that our service is designed around your requirements.
In the competitive world of business, a company's success is highly dependent on the performance and productivity of its team. However, recent studies conducted at Cardiff University and funded by the Health & Safety Executive have discovered that employee productivity is dramatically reduced when under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
Drug and alcohol abuse not only affects work performance in general but also results in higher rates of absence from work, accidents, illness and death, with all their related costs. It is therefore an important health and safety issue in its own right. According to recent studies, findings suggest that:
- Absence from work is 2 - 3 times higher for drug and alcohol users than for other employees;
- Employees with drug / alcohol dependency problems may claim three times as many sickness benefits.
- In many workplaces, 20 to 25 per cent of accidents at work, involve intoxicated people injuring themselves and colleagues.
Oral Mucosal Transudate (OMT) Testing
The sample collected is known as Oral Mucosal Transudate (OMT), which is an ultra-filtrate of blood and is ideal not only to detect drugs and their metabolites but also to screen for blood borne viruses and other disease markers.
There are a number of advantages to collecting oral fluid for sampling: it is relatively non-invasive to collect; there is no need to provide specialised training to collect a sample; there is no need to provide a subject with privacy during the sample collection, in contrast to the collection of other biological samples, such as urine sample; a sample can be collected in almost any environment under the complete observation of the person overseeing the collection process. Any inconvenience caused to the subject can thus be minimised and the possibility of the sample being compromised is greatly reduced. With an oral fluid sample, diagnostic data for such diseases or conditions as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and hepatitis are available without having to draw a person’s blood.
Saliva is less comparable to whole blood and OMT which gives greater linearity between the oral fluid sample and whole blood and their drug/analyte contents during testing. OMT is derived from the interface between the teeth and gum is referred to as crevicular fluid (CF) or gingival fluid (GF) or sometimes gingival crevicular fluid (GCF). GCF is a fluid containing plasma proteins, which continually leak across the membranes, GCF is produced by the sulcular epithelium of the oral mucosa. In times of inflammatory processes of the gingiva, like gingivitis or periodontitis, the production of CF is increased, even before the inflammation is clinically visible. The action of swabbing and stimulation of the gingival sulcus results in the increased release of GCF.
Hair Strand Analysis
Hair strand analysis gives a unique detailed account of an individual’s long term drug history. Drugs and metabolites remain stable in the hair shafts enabling drug detection long after the drug has gone from the rest of the body. Further to this, since research confirms that head hair grows at an average rate of 1.0cm per month, Alpha Biolabs highly skilled staff are able to give detailed reports of drug use for a month to month period.
Therefore, this type of testing provides definitive answers regarding drug use or abstinence from 1 week for up to a 12 month period depending on the length of the hair being tested.
For a client with no head hair, hair from other areas of the body can be collected and analysised.
This type of analysis is ideal when you require a historical profile of drug misuse and can therefore differentiate between a person that abuses drugs on a regular basis or a one off user.
Corporations use this type of analysis for a wide range of reasons including recruitment and workplace testing.