I'm calling B.S. here. I know several people who work for the FDA and they ARE looking out for the interests of the American people. They are in the difficult position of assessing efficacy of drugs and other therapies while identifying and monitoring for unexpected side effects. You want to impugn the FDA? Show data.

Uhm, I *have* been nailed by a pigeon when it flew over my cap...

The point of test like this is that it is a quick screen. If you think of DNA and RNA together as being the source code for an organism, these probes are basically regular expressions looking for stretches of DNA that match DNA/RNA sequences of pathogens - quick and easy. In order to find "not the patient", we would need to know "the patient" DNA, which, aside from issues of definition, would have to start with PCR and sequencing of the person - not at all quick, and would have to be on file before the infection in order to be able to identify the "not the person" parts. I'm more worried about false positives - no test is 100% perfect; this amounts to running several thousand imperfect tests against the patient's sample. So there are many opportunities for false positives to occur. I'm guessing there's either build-in redundancy for internal controls.

Next Poll:

Which of the following answers should we include so Slashdot Polls don't look like they were written by marketing drones?

A) Cowboy Neal
B) CmdrTaco
C) In Soviet Russia, Slashdot Polls you!
D) ??
E) Profit!