Alcohol tests are not just taken by police officers on the side of the road after you have been pulled over for suspected drunk driving.  More companies are requiring alcohol testing as part of routine drug screenings to see if their employees are drinking on the job or after industrial accidents happen at the workplace.

In the United States alone, alcohol abuse or alcoholism accounts for over one half of the automobile related deaths and over half of the industrial accidents.  There are basically five different types of alcohol tests that companies will run on employees or potential employees.  They are urine tests, blood tests, breathalyzer tests, saliva tests and hair tests. Detection time of alcohol in a urine drug test can be up to eighty hours or longer after use if EtG detection is used.  EtG stands for Ethyl Glucuonide and it is a metabolite of ethanol alcohol.  The presence of Ethyl glucuronide in the urine is sign of recent alcohol consumption even if there is no trace of ethanol alcohol present in the urine. In the urine, alcohol can be detected for up to two to four days and in the saliva, usually up to four hours.  The traditional method of alcohol testing just detects the presence of alcohol in your body.

Once the alcohol dissipates in a few hours then it appears that the person is clean.  More stringent testing used to find EtG metabolites present in the urine can reveal a more accurate depiction of the actual alcohol intake of the person.