The main role of swabs is for dressing, or for wiping on an area. It is usually used as a tool to collect microorganisms, exfoliated cells or secretions for medical examination. They are divided into pharyngeal swabs and nasal swabs. Today we will mainly talk about the more common pharyngeal swab collection process.

Pharyngeal swab sampling process

1, Ask the patient to sit with the head tilted back and open the mouth wide to remove the superficial parting of the must in the anterior nasal aperture.

2、The sampler fixes the immobile mouth with a tongue depressor and turns over the tongue with a polyester cloth or calcium alginate swab to the posterior pharyngeal wall and tonsillar crypt and external wall.

3、Repeatedly scrub 3 to 5 times to collect mucosal body cells.

4、Gently remove the swab to prevent touching the mouth, suspensory pituitary, oral mucosa and saliva.

5、Insert the swab back into the sampling device or a suitable shipping device.

Note

1、For septic pharyngitis, oropharyngeal swab bacterial culture is critically used to screen for group A beta-hemolytic streptococci and secret streptococcus hemolyticus.

2、When detecting Neisseria gonorrhoeae in oropharyngeal swabs, clinical medicine needs to inform the laboratory in advance.

3, for pediatric patients, it is appropriate to report basic Haemophilus influenzae.

4、In general, pharyngeal swab specimen collection is not used independently to confirm the diagnosis of respiratory tract infections, and it is advisable to collaborate with nasopharyngeal swabs or nasopharyngeal extracts to enhance the pathogenic diagnosis of respiratory infections.

Pharyngeal swabs as a method of nucleic acid testing

Nucleic acid test is an important method to confirm the diagnosis of neo-coronavirus. Nucleic acid is the genetic material of neo-coronavirus, RNA, and nucleic acid test is to check a certain fragment of RNA, if it is positive, it means you are infected with neo-coronavirus.

Depending on the sampling site, nucleic acid tests can be divided into many types, such as pharyngeal swabs, anal swabs, tracheal secretions, alveolar lavage fluid, and so on.

The pharyngeal swab is the most commonly used, taking oropharyngeal or nasopharyngeal secretions for testing.

Is it uncomfortable when sampling pharyngeal swabs?

When sampling, there will be a slight pain, and when stimulating the throat, there will be a feeling of wanting to vomit, but the feeling is not strong, and it will be fine for a while.