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Posted on 10/18/2001 11:43:02 AM PDT by Constitution Day
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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Vital Living Products Inc., a maker of water testing kits, is planning to ship home anthrax tests to retailers before Thanksgiving, company President and Chief Executive Donald Prodrebarac said on Thursday.
After the Sept. 11 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, Prodrebarac said the company was planning to develop a kit to detect toxic agents before the recent anthrax scares around the country.
Prodrebarac said he called a microbiologist who has done work with the company on Sept. 12 and determined that anthrax was the ``most obvious'' agent for a test kit.
Vital Living Products, of Matthews, North Carolina, sells a water testing kit for coliform bacteria through home improvement stores under the PurTest brand and has provided the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with kits. A simple detection of the disease can come from a nose swab test.
The new test kit, called the PurTest Anthrax Test, which will retail for $19 to $25, was adapted to test for anthrax on surfaces and in the water and air.
``It wasn't like we were coming at this from scratch,'' Prodrebarac said on the creation of a test kit for a toxic agent.
The Centers for Disease Control, based in Atlanta, said anthrax is diagnosed in people from isolating the germ from the blood, skin lesions or respiratory secretions or by measuring specific antibodies in the blood of persons with suspected cases.
Since the company announced definite plans to develop the kit on Oct. 16 and was featured in a Wall Street Journal article on Thursday, Prodrebarac said he has received calls from investors, consumers and retailers expressing interest.
``There have been lots of questions and understandably so,'' he said.
When asked about false positives generated from the test, Prodrebarac said, ``So far we have not had that issue take place. We haven't had false negatives either. This is a very, very accurate test.'' The company has set a press conference about the test kit on Oct. 23 in New York.
Of course, the company is probably privately held, so "President and Chief Executive Donald Prodrebarac" will be the man with all the do-re-mi pretty soon.
CC:
I saw your article, just after I posted this.
I will have to reserve judgement on this company until I hear of independent testing of its kits.
After all, you can ADVERTISE that you have a working perpetual-motion machine all you want.
Making one that WORKS is a different story altogether.
FRegards,
CD
See my above disclaimer (#6) - I am quite skeptical, too.
Like it or not, right now ANTHRAX IS NEWS.
This is a news forum, after all.
Is VLPI on the NASDAQ?
America is something no other country can ever be - a gigantic economic dynamo which can out-produce any other nation on earth. A giant market which devours mass-produced products like no other society which ever existed. We are a society which thives on challenges and adversity. If Osama and Saddam really wanted to destroy us, they should just leave us alone. The chances of self-destruction, slim as they are, are better than any chance an aggressor can destroy us.
Relief is finally here:
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