Home Saliva Tests For Covid-19 May Be Coming Soon(1)
There are many ways to test for COVID-19, and each method has its advantages and disadvantages. However, most methods require a medical professional to insert a long, flexible swab up your nose and take a sample from the back of your throat, which is an invasive, painful and unpleasant process. Yes, it is reliable, but it is not the most inspiring way to convince people to be tested.
Saliva-based tests may be more popular. Most people can spit sputum into a container at home, so there is no need to go to the clinic or drive-through testing agency-when an infectious disease is spreading around the world, this is an added benefit, and it is not There will be any discomfort. Adding this more convenient test option is also cheaper than other tests, can greatly increase the test rate, and make schools, workplaces, restaurants, shops and any other places where people gather safer.
In April of this year, the US Food and Drug Administration (EUA) granted emergency use permission (EUA) for the first saliva test for COVID-19, but still requires people to be present in the presence of health care professionals , Spit the saliva into a special container with a special solution. In May of this year, for the first time, it was authorized to allow people to provide their own samples at home. EUA only applies to tests performed by Rutgers University developers; samples must be collected in special test tubes sent by scientists to humans, and then analyzed in the Rutgers Clinical Genomics Laboratory.
However, recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an EUA test called SalivaDirect. This test does not require a special (and possibly expensive) container, and any standard non-standard test can be used for a few cents. Bacteria container. Laboratories can apply for authorization to directly process saliva samples. Once in the laboratory, researchers do not need to use special chemicals to extract the genetic material of the virus. These so-called reagents are also used in other tests, which means that in the past few months, these reagents have been in short supply as the demand for testing has soared. SalivaDirect’s EUA still requires people to spit in the presence of health care professionals, but the company has asked the FDA to expand this authorization to allow people to collect sputum samples at home.
Anne Wylie, co-developer of SalivaDirect and associate researcher of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, said that although intuitively simple, it is not for sars-cov -2 (causing COVID-19). -19 virus) and other viruses are not always easy to perform saliva testing. For most of her career, Willie has been using saliva as a test sample.
She said: “Saliva itself is a newer diagnostic method, but many people don’t know how to use it, are afraid to use it, or are unsure of how to use it.” “A method that works with cotton swabs does not mean the same. The method is also applicable to saliva."
She pointed out that the use of cotton swabs to collect samples is more standardized, and more people have received training and are satisfied with the reliability of this method. But this is not the case for saliva, which explains why it is unwilling to rely on saliva in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is also the fact that in the first few months of the outbreak, researchers were not sure whether saliva was a good place to find viruses, because most of the diseases they found were related to the respiratory tract. Subsequent studies have shown that this virus does exist in saliva and is a convenient way to detect SARS-CoV-2.
