Taiwan News
Date: 2016-09-07
By: George Liao, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

National Cheng Kung University announced Wednesday it has successfully developed a portable saliva (oral fluid-based) drug test system that takes only 10 minutes to detect drug use with accuracy rates of above 90 percent.

Currently police rely mostly on urine and blood tests to detect drug use, but when spot checks are conducted, there might not be any toilets around the checkpoints, and blood tests have even more limitation as they require taking samples of blood, NCKU said.

The saliva drug test system will eliminate these limitations for law enforcement officers when they conduct spot checks, and there are no human right violation issues to worry about either, NCKU said. Saliva tests can save time, too, and therefore they are good replacements for urine and blood tests, the university added.

The NCKU saliva drug test system was developed by Professor Lin Yu-cheng and his group after three years of research with the support of the Ministry of Science and Technology. The technology has been transferred to a company for production.     [FULL  STORY]