All the big shots say don’t start buying or taking drug treatment for anthrax and small pox, but none of them are mentioning test kits.
Is it patriotic to buy a kit if I get sniffles or goosebumps, so I can avoid putting a burden on our medical professionals? Or would it be better to walk it off until I drop dead, my last rational thought being, “Maybe I shouldda got this looked at”. Is there a shortage?
You mean you want to give yourself a blood test and do really complicated cultures and all that sort of stuff?
This isn’t like you’re checking to see if you’re pregnant. I doubt there’s a market for this.
You might as well have home cancer detection kits.
Exactly. These tests need to be done by trained professionals to get reliable results. If you are a trained professional, then hey, go to it!
Plus they’re probably pretty expensive…
There is a home kit to detect prostate cancer (it actually measures PSA not cancer per se), but it’s not approved by the FDA. There’s a test that is approved by the FDA and that is advertised “to Detect Early Warning Signs of Colon Cancer” (it actually measures blood in the stool, not colon cancer per se).
there’s nothing so complex about dropping a qtip into a petri dish, if somebody’s created the right media. I used to work in a lab – the chemists complained they were just cooking out of a cookbook, anybody with a day’s training could do 90% of their job. the microbiologist cultured stuff with no more real work than a gardener. The “experts” are seriously overstating the level of training necessary for this stuff. It might take a PHD to design a given bio process, but once it’s written down a bright highschool dropout could do the actual work. And this would be to produce weapons, not just detect them.
There is already a company advertising an anthrax home test kit “available soon”. How good it will be, I don’t know.
And, no market for it? If it works and is cheap and fast enough (i suppose a test that gives results in a week, but you’re dead in 4 days, wouldn’t help), there’s a market for kajillions of them if there’s another outbreak.