Like the previous year, 2021 is expected to be dominated by the coronavirus pandemic. Apart from the difficulties it has imposed on the healthcare system, it has made India realise the importance of biomedical resources. It has pushed India to optimise the latent capabilities which the country possesses, across the public and private sector to promote indigenous development and manufacturing.
2020 saw many innovative solutions entering the market within the diagnostic space particularly for COVID-19 testing. A majority of them came from the academic sector, after receiving timely regulatory approvals and commercialisation.
Although India worked relentlessly towards developing innovative testing solutions for COVID-19 throughout last year, the timely detection of a number of other infectious diseases got sidelined. A recent example is the rise of a rare fungal infection mucormycosis.
In India, the range and burden of infectious diseases are enormous such as tuberculosis, malaria, filariasis, leprosy, HIV infection, typhoid, hepatitis etc. In fact, inadequate containment of the vector has resulted in recurrent outbreaks of dengue fever and reemergence of chikungunya virus disease and typhus fever.
For instance, India is home to approximately 2.8 million tuberculosis patients, making it the largest number in a single country. On the other hand, more than a decade after India eliminated leprosy, the disease continues to linger on. Adding on, India’s malaria surveillance system ranks among the worst in the world according to the World Health Organization (WHO). According to a study published in The Lancet in 2020, diarrheal diseases, tuberculosis and lower respiratory infections were among the leading causes of deaths in India in 2019.
This story is from the June 2021 edition of Bio Spectrum.
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This story is from the June 2021 edition of Bio Spectrum.
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