People who rely on personal breathalyser kits to check their alcohol levels stand a good chance of falling foul of police checks, medical researchers have warned.
Official advice to drivers in the UK is not to drink alcohol and drive – but the law allows low levels of alcohol in the breath and blood.
Drivers above the drink-driving limit face the loss of their licences for at least a year and potentially other penalties.
Writing in BMJ Open, researchers say self-testing devices are widely available in pharmacies.
They tested the devices on more than 200 drinkers in central Oxford – with an average age of 20.
Using a police breathalyser, they found that 18% were over the drink-driving limit.
But the self-testing kits gave different results to the police device, often underestimating alcohol levels, the researchers say. This meant that about 10-20% of drinkers would wrongly think they were under the limit.
One device would only have identified 25% of those over the limit, they report.
The researchers, led by Dr Helen Ashdown, of the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Services, Oxford University, say: “Our research suggests that at least some personal breathalysers available for sale to the public are not always sufficiently sensitive to test safety to drive after drinking alcohol, where use of inaccurate information from breathalysers, thought to be accurate, could have catastrophic safety implications for drivers.”
They add: “Our research raises worrying questions about the level of scrutiny that medical tests intended for sale to the public undergo in Europe, and raises wider concerns about how diagnostic accuracy, in particular, is evaluated.”
Diagnostic accuracy study of three alcohol breathalysers marketed for sale to the public BMJ Open 20 December 2014; doi 10.1136/bmjopen-2014-005811 [abstract]
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