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Suparshva Swabs, India’s leading personal hygiene company known for its Tulips brand, is all set to ramp its production to 5 million from the current over 2 million COVID-19 swabs a week.
This according to the company would be by the May end and will give the healthcare providers in the country to further accelerate COVID-19 testing.
To meet the national need for COVID-19 tests, the company is ramping up production, by converting its production lines and reconfiguring equipment, of some of its manufacturing capabilities. The company has the largest installed capacity of Cotton buds in Asia & possesses capability of taking the COVID-19 swab production to over 30 million swabs per week, if required in due course.
The intent is to make the country self-reliant in nasal and throat swabs, a critical component in to test COVID-19 and rely less on supplies from other countries. With rising number of COVID-19 cases, the company shifted focus to affordable swabs, as domestically produced swabs would cost one-tenth the imported throat swabs.
TULIPS novel polyester spun swabs has excellent collection and release properties. Polyester fiber has been tested and validated for use in specimen collection in microbiology, RT-PCR analysis. The brand Tulips received the ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research) and NIV (National Institute of Virology) validation for domestically produced ‘polyester’ swabs.
There is a paucity of swabs not just in India but globally too. We are eyeing a total production of 30 million in the coming years to be prepared for an escalation of the virus infection, said Rahul Jain, partner, Suparshava Swabs at a virtual press briefing here today.
We developed polyester swabs for COVID testing by converting the 100% cotton processing lines, to produce polyester swabs, within 10 days flat. What is unique here, is that the entire development was done in-house and the trials were done on main production lines, which enabled us to start producing the same day we received the ICMR approval,” he added.
With COVID-19 positive cases in India crossing 1,00,000 and fatalities surpassing 3,000, experts believe, we must act decisively to outsmart the virus and contain the outbreak. Affordable swabs enable mitigating this human crisis by accelerating preventive testing, and quickly meeting the massive demand to a decrease in outbreak as well as a return to normalcy, he said.
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