New saliva test could be ‘game changer’

TORONTO — Toronto scientists say they’ve developed a new, saliva-based test for the COVID-19 virus whose precision and ease of use could make it a “game changer” in combating the pandemic.

The antigen test requires subjects to simply spit out a sample, needs no health worker to administer an uncomfortable nasal swab and could be processed relatively quickly in a mobile laboratory, say the researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital’s Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute.

Perhaps most crucially, their initial trial run on saliva samples from known COVID patients suggests the test is just as accurate as the gold-standard PCR technology used most commonly now in Canada.

With an ability to test hundreds of people per hour using minimal staff — and producing results in one to four hours — it could be easily deployed to screen individuals without symptoms, such as school staff and students or employees at a factory, they say.

The test is still in the experimental phase, and the first small study was posted on a “preprint” site without peer review.

I was disappointed but not surprised to see that the proposed regulations accompanying the Water Act undermine the intent of that legislation.

The decision to “grandfather in” the existing holding ponds, and any built before the 16th of June is an unforgivable giveaway to those who would flout the spirit of the law for their own private short-term financial gain at the expense of the common good.

The government should immediately axe this shameless handout to corporate farms that are literally sucking the water and carbon from the island, leaving the resulting exhausted soil to blow away and decorate the snows of Cape Bretton Island with a pretty pink hue.

David L. B. Woodbury, Charlottetown