Serum banking can be a life saver-collecting serum from you, your family and your primate is a sound way of insuring you have the information you and your veterinarian need when a crisis occurs. This sample may be collected by your veterinarian when they are doing a yearly blood work exam and therefore should represent the state of your animal when it is healthy. In this way, when a problem develops, a sample collected during the crisis can be compared to the one you collected when the animal was healthy to pick up any discrepancies. In addition, samples from you and others when illness occurs, can be used to establish that your animal was or wasn't infected by you, or that the animal was not the source of an infectious disease outbreak that affected other humans-a potential liability issue. Such samples can be collected
sequentially over the life of the animal to provide longitudinal data and
updated when the opportunitiy arises.
Collecting serum and storing it in your home freezer in proper containers (such as those with an "o" ring top) does not allow sample deterioration (principally dehydration/concentration) over time (most modern freezers are 'frost free' freezers, and go through a thaw cycle leading to sample dehydration).
Diseases and conditions that might be diagnosed by comparison to this
stored sample include: hormonal imbalances (may require more than one serum banked sample), and viral diseases, and general biochemical assessments of organ function or toxin accumulation over time (e.g was something toxic eaten?).