Question: what type of samples have you received?

Rory Miles answered on 12 Mar 2014:

In my work I receive many different types of samples. This depends on where the microbe likes to live in the body when it’s causing the disease. For example, some bacteria cause infections mainly on the skin. For these it would be little use to test the blood of the patient, so microbiology laboratories in hospitals are sent a swab of the patients skin instead. Different labs also receive different types of sample. A lab called histology receives whole tissue samples that they then have to slice into smaller bits. Doctors then look at these under a microscope, usually to look for signs of cancer (large amounts of growing cells). One of my jobs is to make sure that the sample types received by my lab can be tested and get a correct result. It would not be good for us to test something like a poo sample and say it was negative , so the patient does not receive medicine, when they actually have the disease. Therefore, we have to test lots of different sample types to ensure we can test these correctly. The most preferred samples to recieve are blood and urine. This is because they are really easy to collect.