Five minute drug testing

Unlike traditional urine testing methods, dds2 takes oral fluid and delivers a result in only five minutes. The mobile analyser is lightweight, battery powered and can be carried comfortably, yet it is also rugged for any hazardous, dirty or wet working environments. The test process is designed to be clean with no sample to mix, pour or pipette.

According to Martek, companies who have an active drugs screening policy can reduce their screening times by over 60% and provide a screening service to their employees that is less intrusive and not as degrading as urine testing. The DDS2 is being actively used by Police Forces throughout the UK and across the World for roadside screening. No special training is required by the tester.

Workers in transport, construction, production or any high risk environment should be screened to ensure that the company are not exposed to huge public liability claims, should a drugs taker cause accident, injury or even death whilst working for the company. Should a positive result be taken, a drugs collection kit is provided along with all custody forms and return parcel etc. These samples are then tested in an accredited lab to confirm or otherwise the positive result. In hundreds of thousands of tests to date the technology and lab have never delivered conflicting results.

Steve Coulson, director at Martek Lifecare commented: "This gives peace of mind to the employer that results are fast, accurate, respectful and time/cost saving."

To fulfil drug screening obligations many organisations use external private companies who offer a service where testers carry out urine testing in the organisation’s toilets. Steve Coulson added: "This type out dated testing is highly intrusive and disruptive to employees and operations. whereas none of these facilities or disruption is needed with DDS2."

The UK is at the forefront of research into and prevention of drug use in the work place. Research reports reveal some very concerning statistics on drug use in society. At least one in thirty employees in the UK has drugs in their system at any point in time and there was a 43% increase in UK employees testing positive for drug use from 2007 to 2011. With the price of drugs seeing a major fall in recent years and the emergence of many new 'legal highs', this percentage is expected to increase, as drugs continue to be an increasing problem in society.

Organisations that take the problem seriously and implement drug testing programmes, commonly observe decreased drug prevalence rates over several years, often exceeding 50%. A British manufacturing company, employing a workforce of several hundred, implement a testing programme as part of their drug and alcohol policy. In the early stages of the testing programme, the observed positivity rates exceeded 25%. 12 months following implementation, positivity rates decreased to 6% representing a decrease in drug prevalence of over 75%. Employers also have a duty of care to provide a safe work environment and an obligation to ensure that workers are not misusing substances that can impair their ability to carry out tasks safely.
 
DDS2 marks a massive breakthrough in technology and is the world’s first and only truly portable drug tester from oral fluid. Developed by leading scientists out of Cambridge University, DDS2 now enables organisations to instantly and without disruption,  test anyone, anytime, anywhere. The system concurrently tests for up to six drugs including all the standard drugs of abuse: Amphetamine (AMP), Benzodiazepines (BZO), Cannabis (THC), Cocaine (COC), Methadone (MTD), Methamphetamine (MAMP) and Opiates (OPI). A total of twenty six drug tests are currently available including for newer drugs such as SPICE, Ketamine and Mephedrone.
 
Each test takes around two to three minutes to administer with the donor using a swab stick to collect saliva and a clear colour change indicates the stick is ready for testing. The test stick is then simply inserted into the DDS2 instrument with a definitive test result read on the display in five minutes. It detects drugs up to three times quicker than urine tests. This could be crucial to avoiding false negatives after a drug related incident or if an operator had cause for suspicion of drug use. It gives a definitive positive or negative result and there’s no subjective interpretation of faint lines leading to uncertainty of the result as with urine test cups/strips. Unlike urine testing, DDS2 saliva testing is immune from sample adulteration/tampering, giving much greater confidence and reliability of results. DDS2 tests are 100% specific to the target drugs so there's no possible cross interference like with some urine tests.
  
As DDS2 is an electronic instrument with data logging, it automatically maintains a full record of up to 10,000 tests. For independent laboratory legal verification of positive tests Martek provide a complimentary saliva test with full legal ‘Chain of custody’ procedure.

www.martek-lifecare.com