While the entire India is fighting Covid19 through lockdowns and social-distancing, the bigger killer tuberculosis for the time being takes a back seat.
Goa-based director of Bigtech and Molbio Diagnostics Pvt Ltd, N Sriram said, “It is very surprising that people hardly realise that tuberculosis kills a lot more people per day in India than what COVID-19 has done so far. If you go by the statistics, around 1400 people die every day due to tuberculosis every day in India and in the last 2-3 months we have only seen about 2500 people succumbing to COVID-19. I think COVID-19 is overhyped and fear is setting in peoples’ mind.”
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Tuberculosis was in earlier days, before cancer, the biggest killer in Bollywood too. Remember the movie ‘Anand’, in which the protagonist (Rajesh Khanna) dies of ‘TB’ and ‘Dr Banerjee’ (Amitabh Bachchan, his best friend), could not save him. There are several movies which did highlight it on screen. Yes, it is still the biggest killer a fact which has not been emphasised by the government with force.
“Today all focus has shifted to COVID-19 and not much is happening on TV commercials on TB and the patients suffering from TB are already having a tough time,” laments Sriram.
When asked why the focus was not there to eradicate tuberculosis, Sriram was of the view that “globally in the last 4-5 years it is now been taken seriously and it was decided that the eradication of TB should be done by 2035 trough global elimination programme. However, Indian government took this challenge and announced that it would achieve this task before 2025, ten years before the standards set by the World Health Organisation.”
Molbio Diagnostics was producing 15-20 thousand tests per day and were supposed to produce 35-40 thousands tests per day as per the government requirements, but with COVID-19 coming up, the focus changed and the entire focus is now on producing test kits for COVID-19.
“As of now, since April 4, 2020, when we got the licence from Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) to produce the tests kits, we have already supplied three lakh tests kits to the government in the last one month and we are geared up to provide another 1.2 to 1.5 million test kits per month. In next two-three months we can get to 3-4 million tests kits for COVID-19,” said Sriram.
Molbio Diagnostics, business fundamentals of producing test kits for tuberculosis has now completely changed due to the entry of COVID-19. “However, I am hopeful that soon normalcy will return and the present scenario will change and soon people will realise that COVID-19 is also a part of our life as we have flu and influenza,” added Sriram.
However, the difference between TB and COVID-19 is that TB is a bacterial infection, while COVID-19 spreads through a virus and thus the later spreads faster. “In the past we had SARS and Ebola viruses too. People were infected but developed immunity to it very quickly. In fact the fatality rate through COVID-19 virus is very low and it is almost as the case in normal flu or the Swine flu,” added Sriram.
When quizzed on the terms of investment the company had to put in develop and produce COVID-19 test kits, Sriram said that their major investment was there to make the platform which was the test kits.
“The setting up of that basic platform facility has cost us about Rs 350 crore which is lot of money but for development of COVID-19 test kits did not cost much as we needed to work on reagents as we already had the kits ready,” added Sriram who employs close to 300 people in Goa and also has an R&D facility at Bengaluru and some in sales which amounts to about 450 people in his team.
The company also has over 25 international clients and all are waiting to receive to orders that they have placed. “We are waiting for the lifting of ban in exports so that we can send our products also to those countries which are already willing to pay us in advance. However, at this point of time we cannot to do anything as there is an embargo on export of all diagnostic equipment. Even though we have distribution in about 25 countries, at the moment our export business is absolutely zero,” added Sriram.
