In fields such as clinical medicine, forensic sciences, environmental quality testing, food quality assurance, drug testing, and other areas, it has become possible to determine the presence and/or amount of trace substances in test samples even when such substances are present in very low concentrations (on the order of parts per million and parts per billion). Substance abuse has given rise to widespread urine specimen testing. Positive test results identifying an illicit substance in a specimen may have a profound impact on the donor's career or employment. In the proper circumstances, positive test results may also result in criminal liability for the donor. As another example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency conducts a variety of ongoing testing programs. These testing programs are intended to guarantee compliance with standards for maximum levels of toxic and/or radioactively contaminated fluids, such as plant effluent, and results of tests can figure in civil and criminal liabilities.
Particularly in the area of testing for substance abuse, large and increasingly high volumes of urine testing has created a need for specialized specimen collection containers and apparatus for transferring liquids from specimen collection containers without adulterating either the sample removed or the liquid remaining in the container. Thus, there has been a need for a liquid specimen collection container that provides for more than one isolated specimen of a sample to provide redundancy for third party confirmation testing, that automatically retains an archival specimen so that tests may be repeated on the identical specimen and the results of the screening tests either verified or disproved, and that cannot be accessed without evident tamper. Providing these benefits, embodiments of a specimen collection container device invention have been described which eliminates human contact with the specimen once the specimen is sealed in the device and which provides split specimen collection. These descriptions are set forth in pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/180,872 filed Jan. 11, 1994, entitled "Fluid Sample Receptacle", incorporated herein by reference as if set forth verbatim, and in its parent application Ser. No. 08/027,860, filed Mar. 8, 1993, now abandoned.
Apparatus is described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/179,436, filed Jan. 10, 1994, for automated sampling to obtain aliquots from specimen collection devices that have certain features of devices described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/180,872 and herein. The aliquots are used for high volume screening and verification tests.
However urine testing facilities that do not have the testing volume to support an automated sampling apparatus as described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/179,436 need a method and apparatus for removing samples of urine from a container such as described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/180,872 and herein. This invention is directed to that need.
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