Coming clean: Drug and alcohol testing in the workplace

Drug testing in the workplace is a comparatively new situation that is observed to exist globally, relocating all around companies operating in developing countries. Others state authoritatively that it should be carried out because it is a practical way of controlling drug abuse in the workplace. Arguments occur in the workplace drug testing. The problems cover from privacy questions to duty every individual has to perform. This topic is to be covered with questions like whether examination results exactly serve an indication of substance abuse in the workplace or if they primarily manifest activities outside of the workplace.

The initial debate in favor of Workplace Drug Testing involves most to “safety-critical” business occupations like medicine, transport and construction where disabled senses and discrimination can have impactful outcomes. In addition, advocates of Workplace Drug Testing claim that employers have a “duty of care” to produce a secure working environment.

The justification and opposition are immeasurable. Oppositions of the benefit of Workplace Drug Testing do not argue that it can display only use instead of the influence of presentation, nor can it recognize between use and abuse. Workplace Drug Testing lifts a variety of moral concerns, including the privacy of personal information and whether an employer has a freedom to know what employees do outside of working hours. Moreover, Workplace Drug Testing is not totally reliable, resulting rare “false positives”.

R. Soriano

Lasers have been part of the human world for the past ten years with the implementations of laser pointers and CD players to medicine and science research. Lasers are also significant because of its précised way of production and have an exact emission color. We can also picture out lasers as an electronic device we can touch and hold with our bare hands or as a huge box in the center of a research laboratory.

Fluorescent dyes are also common in research and used in to diagnose or distinguish specific cell and tissue types. To light up a fluorescent dye makes it to produce and discharge the light with a distinctive color. This color and intensity are used for measurement in concentrations of different chemical substances like DNA and proteins. The essential disadvantage of fluorescent dyes is that only limited colors can be identified.

Two different technologies that have joined research identifies that if a dye is put in an optical cavity, it can produce a laser. This optical cavity is an electric equipment that keeps light. Based on the research of the journal Nature Photonics, it can give a tiny laser that produce and release light inside a single living cell.

When it comes to attentively designing a laser, it is possible to reach 1 trillion cells which have extraordinary label. That is approximately similar to the total number of cells in the human body. For this reason, every cell in the human body can be possibly identified and monitored. This is a long jump from cell-tagging methods which can tag at most few hundred cells. Up to this time, Petri dishes were only tagged cells and it is still possible that it can also work for human body cells.

S. Yun