Alcohol Prescreening For Employees-What Used To Be Considered A Waste Of Money Is Now Being Reconsidered

Previous articles, studies and other findings indicate that alcohol testing for employees used to be considered a lot of company money wasted. The reason being was that preceding types of alcohol testing for employees could only test short term substance abuse and no matter how strong of an alcohol abuser an employee is, there were always ways for that person to be clean long enough for a urine or saliva sample, or contamination or tampering or the sample taken was too weak for the type of testing performed to accurately tell if a person was currently abusing or was actually a chronic abuser.

Recent new discoveries in alcohol testing have suddenly changed how far employers can test someone for alcohol abuse. Alcohol hair testing has opened a window of opportunity for prescreening employers that wasn’t previously available.

Alcohol hair testing is a fairly new discovery. Hair drug testing has been around for awhile, but until now, urine alcohol testing was the way to test a person for alcohol consumption. Hair testing for drugs use to be the only type of hair testing that had been done, because alcohol testing for hair wasn’t available. Types of alcohol prescreening commonly used before alcohol hair testing and often still used today are urine alcohol testing and saliva testing. Here is the pros and cons of each:

Urine alcohol testing:
• Inexpensive
• Provides ability to test for several different types of substances
• The specimen can be adulterated, substituted, or diluted
• Has a small window of detection
• Urine can take up to 2 hours before alcohol is present in the system
• With EtG testing, urine alcohol tests up to 80 hours only
• Intrusive and rather embarrassing form of testing

Saliva testing:
• Doesn’t show metabolites in the saliva as long as they do in the urine or hair
• Provides a relatively short window of detection, approximately 10 to 24 hours.
• Is taken under supervision to deter tampering
• Sample is less invasive then a urine sample

Hair alcohol testing was developed by an English and German team of scientists who have found a way, through the discovery of using a unique series of assessments called FAEE, fatty acid ethyl esters and EtG, or ethyl glucuronide EtG alcohol testing to measure the amount of FAEE and EtG markers that are revealed in the tests only found in a person’s hair if they have consumed alcohol.

With this new discovery, these scientists found a way to test for long term alcohol abuse using a hair sample which was never done before. Prior to this, only drug abuse could be found in hair samples, but never alcohol.

With only an inch and a half of hair cut from the scalp of a person, a hair alcohol testing laboratory can find out what a person’s approximated consumption of alcohol has been up to a 30 day history and if the hair sample is longer, as much as a year of alcohol consumption can be tested. The markers can be identified in days, weeks and months. The more alcohol a person has consumed, the more markers will be present on a test, which remain indefinitely.

Alcohol Hair Testing
• Reduces re-occurring random drug testing,
• Is much less invasive than either urine alcohol testing or saliva testing
• By far proves more than a weeks worth of abuse
• Only shaving one’s head will affect the results of the test as there would not be any evidence which to test

The choice is much more cost effective, less intrusive and more accurate for employers. More and more employers, social workers and government agencies are turning to hair alcohol testing for precise, professional and tactful testing over urine alcohol testing.

About the Author:
Melissa Peterman is a web content producer for Innuity. For more information about alcohol hair testing, EtG alcohol testing go to Trimega Laboratories.