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Truth DNA Diagnostics is one of the very few places to offer both alcohol and ETG urine and hair drug testing. These panels are most commonly used for legal purposes, which makes choosing a credited company to help with your testing important! We also offer breath alcohol testing for companies that are a part of the DOT (Department of Transportation) or NON-DOT companies that would like to perform random or reasonable suspicion alcohol testing.adulteration or specimen substitution.

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The Types of Alcohol Testing

Alcohol testing includes urine alcohol testing and the breath alcohol test. Urine alcohol tests are inexpensive, easy to conduct, and typically go back 36 hours, making them a viable option for personal uses, like parents wanting to determine if their child consumed alcohol, as well as legal ones, like probation alcohol testing.

However, standard urine alcohol testing may not be best suited for workplace testing. The challenge is that a positive urine alcohol test is not indicative of current alcohol impairment nor does it definitively indicate beverage alcohol consumption. Also, it's difficult to relate to the urine concentration of alcohol to the legal benchmark, which is blood alcohol.

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For workplace clients who wish to determine impairment or the prohibited use of alcohol, Truth DNA Diagnostics recommends breath alcohol testing.

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Breath Alcohol Test

As we said, for employer workplace testing, alcohol should be tested for using a breath alcohol test, as it determines current impairment. Here's how this test works. When alcohol hits your stomach, it's absorbed into your blood that is eventually carried to other parts of your body, including your lungs. Alcohol is eventually exhaled through the breath. Ultimately, this test measures how much alcohol is in a person's breath, therefore indirectly measuring how much alcohol is in a person's blood, known as their blood alcohol content or blood alcohol concentration (BAC). The test is performed by a trained breath alcohol technician (BAT) using an Evidential Breath Testing (EBT) device.

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Breath alcohol tests are suitable for:

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• Personal uses

• Legal uses (probation, child custody, etc.)

• Employers

• DOT-regulated businesses and individuals

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DOT-regulated employers must use breath alcohol testing for compliance with DOT alcohol testing requirements.

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There is a one-to-one correlation between a breath alcohol level and a blood alcohol level. An individual at a 0.08% blood alcohol level will be at a 0.08% breath alcohol level. The Department of Transportation looks for BAT results of 0.02 or less. If you blow higher than that, what happens next depends on your specific agency.

 

For instance:

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• The FMCSA will not allow you to resume safety-sensitive functions for 24 hours

• The FRA will not allow you to resume safety-sensitive functions for eight hours

• Both the FTA and PHMSA will not allow you back to work until your next scheduled day and no less than eight hours from the time you took your test

• The FAA allows employers to bring you back to work within eight hours

 

EtG Alcohol Testing

Ethanol — commonly called ethyl alcohol, drinking alcohol, or simply alcohol — is the principal type of alcohol found in alcoholic beverages, produced by the fermentation of sugars by yeasts. EtG is a direct metabolite of alcohol. EtG alcohol testing screens for the presence of EtG in urine and hair. This may be used to determine recent ethanol ingestion, even after ethanol is no longer measurable in the body. EtG is only evident when ethanol is ingested and is not produced as a result of fermentation.

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Call 888.995.4DNA for more information.