Wednesday, November 09, 2005
A new Canadian-designed blood test can determine whether a patient is HIV-positive in one minute.
The INSTI kit, which has been approved by Health Canada, is a pinprick test that can be administered at doctors offices, clinics, or care facilities and has shown a 99.6 per cent accuracy rate. The 60-second test is the first point-of-care test of its kind in Canada.
The kit, developed by privately-held bioLytical Laboratories in Richmond, B.C., detects the presence of antibodies to HIV, or Human Immunodeficiency Virus, the precursor to AIDS, in whole blood, serum, or plasma. Currently, an HIV test in Canada can take anywhere from five to 10 days.
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