Pregnancy testing at home soon?

Press, 21 February 1987, Page 13

Pregnancy testing at home soon?

I PA Wellington A do-it-yourself preg-nancy-testing kit — the second such kit to be , made available to New Zealand women — has been cleared by the Health Department and * will go on sale in pharmacies soon. The kit’s distributor, » Reckitt and Colman Phar- ’ maceuticals, Ltd, claimed the kit, called Clearblue, was 99 per cent effective. The kit worked by testing for the hormone, human chorionic gonadotrophin (H.C.G.), which was present in the urine of pregnant women. The kit claimed to be able to - trace H.C.G. the first day after’ a missed period. A woman who suspected she might be pregnant would hold the

tester, a plastic dipstick, in her urine stream and then place it in two prefilled pots of chemical solution. The solution in the second pot would turn the tester blue if the woman was pregnant, but the stick would stay white if she was not. The distributors said Clearblue could detect very small amounts of H.C.G. which other tests might miss. It was this degree of sensitivity which allowed a woman to test with 99 per cent accuracy whether she was pregnant from the first day of a missed period, they said. A scientist in the Health Department, Mr Robert Brock, said the degree of accuracy of home-testing kits depended entirely on

the user following the instructions carefully. Clearblue, he said, was similar to the 15 varieties of pregnancy-testing kits used by medical laboratories, which also sought to identify H.C.G. in urine. In Britain, 700,000 home pregnancy-testing kits were sold each year, but Mr Brock said that in New Zealand the market was largely untapped. “There has always been a tradition for women to go to their own doctor for pregnancy testing rather than do it themselves,” he said.

Even so, when a woman used a home kit and discovered she was pregnant she should still be checked by a doctor, he said.