For thousands of years, doctors looked at, smelled and even tasted their patients’ urine in order to make far-reaching pronouncements about the patient’s present and future health. Routine urine test are still done by the millions, but the expectations of their usefulness are much lower. Routine screening urine tests are notorious for false positives. Perfectly healthy young people, especially females, can sometimes have very abnormal urine, showing protein, blood or glucose. At the same time, the urine test tells us nothing about the most important thing: kidney function.
For these reasons, in 2018, the IRCC Medical Branch introduced routine kidney function screening (“serum creatinine”) to the medical examination process. Urine tests were discontinued altogether in late 2024. The main emphasis is now on detecting impaired kidney function, as many people who have it will eventually require dialysis or kidney transplantation, both extremely expensive.
Australian immigration authorities abandoned requiring urine tests completely in 2023, now relying exclusively on serum creatinine. New Zealand, and many other countries, still require urine tests for their immigration process, and object to abnormal results. This often causes a lot of unnecessary worry, extra expense and delays, while seldom detecting any previously unrecognized disease.
