What if the test comes back positive?
If your house was built in this time period, you should always test your textured ceiling prior to sanding it down or using another removal technique that has the potential to disturb the asbestos fibers. Sanding down an asbestos-containing product releases the fibers into the air in their most dangerous form (as tiny airborn cicle-shaped fibers that embed themselves in human tissue, most dangerously in capillaries in the lungs).
The vast majority of tests come back negative. A positive Pap smear may also show abnormal cells that are not cancerous, or a condition preceding cancer, which allows the cancer to be caught before it has a chance to spread. In the unlikely scenario that a Pap smear does show cancer, catching cervical cancer in its early stages greatly increases a chance for a cure and a larger variety of treatment options. Cervical cancer used to be the number one killer of women, and still is in countries where regular pap smears are not performed. Cervical cancer is one of the most treatable cancers. In the US, the number of women who die from cervical cancer has decreased by 74% since the 1950s, and is dropping annually. Getting regular screening ensures that you will find any changes in your cervix early before it becomes serious. Remember, early detection can save your life!
You have a 99.9 % chance of having a clean mammogram. Only 1 in 1,000 women who have mammograms finds cancer on her mammogram. In the unlikely case that a mammogram does find cancer, it is likely that it will be caught at an early state, when it has an excellent chance of being cured and more treatment options are possible. More than 96% of women whose breast cancer is discovered early survive.
Let’s say that you are conducting a study involving minors that requires exposure to radiation or experimental drugs, and a necessary condition of participation is that the subjects not be pregnant. What happens if you do a screening pregnancy test and the test comes back positive? This is an example of a very hot topic in the clinical research world, and illustrates the concept of an incidental (i.e., outside the scope of the research aims) finding. As we work on drafting a general policy on the who/what/when/how’s to handle such findings, this specific example has come to light. Consultation with counsel and subsequent review of available literature has resulted in the following conclusion: If you find out a minor subject is pregnant, you can only tell the minor. Informing the parent must be done with the minor’s permission to do so. So, for applicable studies you may be conducting, we provide the following language to be inserted into your assent and permission forms. If the study i
