Hair Exposure Drug Testing (ChildGuard®)

When a child is exposed to substance use, they often face other coexisting obstacles to normal life – neglect, abuse, violence, and other vulnerabilities. Substance Use Disorder (SUD) is a disease that often prevents adults from doing what is in a child’s best interest. Detecting dangerous environments is paramount to keeping the child safe. Testing with ChildGuard can assist where other exposure drug tests fall short.

ChildGuard is the only drug test designed to detect passive exposure to drugs, distinguishing between both native drugs and drug metabolites in hair specimens. Drug metabolites are produced in the body only if drugs have been ingested. Children in drug-exposed environments are most often not using substances themselves, so drug metabolites are typically absent when a child is being tested for drug exposure. Typical hair tests with other labs will only report a positive exposure result if drug metabolites are detected, even when the native drug is in the child’s hair specimen. ChildGuard reports a positive result if either native drugs or drug metabolites are detected, giving much better insight into the child’s environment. ChildGuard can provide evidence of substance exposure in a child’s environment for the past 3 months and can be performed on donors of any age.

Environmental exposure in this context is one or more of the following:

• Contact with drug smoke,
• Contact with sweat or sebum (skin oil) of a person in active use,
• Contact with the actual drug,
• Unintentional or intentional ingestion of the drug(s).

Our forensic test for passive exposure is the first and only test of its kind. See our hair testing pages for information about specimen collection. 

ChildGuard Collection Instructions  ChildGuard Collection Slides

ChildGuard Training Video  ChildGuard Fact Sheet  

ChildGuard Resources