Murray Wood: Who's hot and who's not
Every Friday, Murray Wood takes a look at the week's news and decides who's hot and who's not. Today's list includes tho...
A fast, $5 at-home test for COVID-19 has been granted emergency authorization for use in the U.S., but there isn’t any sign of that happening in Canada.
Health Canada maintains that a medical professional must be part of the testing process as there is a significant risk that some people could use the test incorrectly or misinterpret the results.
Dr. David Juncker is the departmental chair of biomedical engineering and principal investigator with the McGill University and Genome Quebec Innovation Centre.
He believes the benefits of home testing outweigh the risks.
“There are home tests as simple to use as a pregnancy test, so people could self-test and find whether they are infected with COVID,” Juncker told Gormley. “The aspiration would be to have a very quick test to find out in minutes if we are infected and whether we should go to work or not.”
Juncker admits there are some risks, like a person getting a false positive or a false negative, but says a pandemic means some rules should be waived.
“What’s the risk assessment, the potential benefit versus the risk we’re having? Thinking of that, you’re driving a car. It’s actually a very dangerous object that you could drive into a wall or a pedestrian, so there’s a big risk. But of course, we all drive and we have all the rules and regulations to do that because the benefits outweigh the risks,” said Juncker.
Juncker says studies in other areas have shown that more testing and faster testing can mean treating the disease faster.
“There have been cases, for example, with HIV testing, where people now have a home test that has been approved and there have been studies that when people have a home test, they test more often and they also then report to a physician,” said Juncker.
Juncker believes most people would be able to do the home tests with no problem, but admits some may do them incorrectly.
“We could do training for it, like with the masks and handwashing,” said Juncker. “At first a lot of people didn’t even know how to properly wash their hands in a way that was medically relevant so there’s been all this information to teach people to wash their hands.”
Juncker says he hopes Health Canada will start to engage on the home-testing issue in a more relevant and deeper discussion and take leadership in promoting possible solutions.
