Urine Testing in Bucks County
Urine testing is an indirect method of attempting to determine the blood alcohol concentration. It can dramatically impact your Bucks County criminal case. When a person consumes alcoholic drinks, some of that alcohol will eventually show up in the person's urine. Alcohol passes from the stomach into the small intestine where it is absorbed into the bloodstream. The blood carries the alcohol to various organs of the body, including the brain, lungs, and kidneys.
Since ethanol is really a poison, rather than a nutrient, the kidneys help to remove alcohol from the blood. Each time the blood goes to the kidneys, a small amount of ethanol is passed through to the bladder. The rest of the ethanol remains in the bloodstream, where it continues to circulate until it is removed by perspiration, breath expiration, breakdown in the liver, or further removal by the kidneys. The small amount of ethanol that is secreted by the kidneys is immediately emptied into the bladder. The bladder stores all of the secretions from the kidney, which are collectively referred to as urine. Thus, consumption of alcohol will produce an increase in the alcohol concentration of the urine.
More Urine Testing in Bucks County Criminal Matters
Determining the exact relationship between the urine alcohol and blood alcohol is quite difficult and should be a source of defense for your Bucks County criminal lawyer. At any given point in time, the urine alcohol concentration does not necessarily reflect the blood alcohol concentration.
Gas chromatography, enzymatic analysis and wet chemical tests are the major methods of determination of the urine alcohol concentration. Besides the general unreliability of converting urine alcohol to blood alcohol and the potential inaccuracies in the testing process as outlined above dealing with blood alcohol, the major sources of the unreliability of urine testing are pooling of the urine, individual variation of the urine to blood alcohol relationship, and endogenous production of alcohol in "live" specimens due to infection by the yeast, Candida albicans.
Pooling of urine occurs when alcohol is secreted by the kidneys and immediately enters the ureter, the tube that connects the kidney to the bladder. The alcohol and the other kidney secretions then proceed to the bladder. The bladder stores all the urine as it is produced by the kidneys. The fact that the bladder stores urine that has been produced over a period of time makes it difficult to predict the blood alcohol concentration.
Some problems in the analysis of infected urine may yield artificially high urine alcohol value. The urine of subjects who suffer from diabetes or yeast infections is often infected with bacteria that can produce alcohol in the presence of glucose. For example, an organism like the common yeast Candidad albicans can produce alcohol in urine while still in the bladder. Sodium fluoride, the compound usually used as a preservative in preserving blood samples, does not prevent the production of alcohol by Candida albicans.