What a busy week we had at USDTL last week. Our President and Scientific Director, Douglas Lewis and our Executive Vice President Veronica Lewis attended the 2011 Conference for Lawyers Assistance Programs (CoLAP) in Tampa, Florida. While Account Executive Bob Demaree and Victoria Lewis attended The National Association of Neonatal Nurses Conference (NANN) in Orlando.

“CoLap was a very good meeting with friendly faces and strong interest in our Alcohol Bio Marker Tests for hair, nails, and blood (NailStat; HairStat and PEthStat),” Doug Lewis said. “We were able to have some great conversations about the advancements in testing. We’ll definitely be back next year.”

Our PEthStat test can determine individual levels of alcohol consumption while ruling out incidental exposure. HairStat can identify usage up to three months after for most drugs and NailStat offers similar advantages but provides a detection window of up to eight months after last usage. Which is an advantage when determining court cases especially in custody litigation.

“NANN was a great conference,” Victoria Lewis stated. “We had a lot of good conversations about what we test for and problems nurses have in detecting and determining drug and alcohol use in mothers that result in harm in their newborns. It was a very interesting conversation.”
USDTL is introducing MecStat EtOH which provides a sensitive and reliable method to identify fetal alcohol exposure at birth. While our CordStat test uses umbilical cord testing to provide a higher level of sensitivity for certain drugs.

If you were at either conference and have more questions please check out our website:https://www.usdtl.com/ or call 800. 235.2367 and speak to one of our account executives.

Q: What can our organization do if we strongly suspect that an individual was drug-exposed, but the specimen results came back negative?

A: All of USDTL’s clients can “dispute” a negative result and request a “re-test” for one or more specific drug classes that are suspected of being present. The re-test is a concept routinely used in workplace urine testing, where a subject disputes a positive result and requests a re-test, which is a re-confirmation of the specimen with a cutoff at 40 percent of the original confirmation cutoff. For non-workplace cases, clinical professionals may believe that drug exposure occurred and dispute the negative finding, which results in a re-confirmation of the disputed drug class at 40 percent of the confirmation cutoff. This re-test then becomes the result of record for the case.

To order a re-test, fax or email USDTL Client Services a re-test request on your letterhead and state the test(s) requested, the subject’s demographic information, the USDTL lab number and your contact information. You can also call Client Services with the case information. Our representative will provide you with the necessary paperwork for you to sign and return to initiate the re-test process. Once the paperwork is in order, Client Services will return a re-test result to you in one to two working days. If you have any questions after receiving the results, please contact Client Services and they will either assist you or direct you to one of our forensic toxicologists to discuss the case with you.