German factory races to turn out COVID-19 syringes
23 December, 2020
The battle against COVID-19 has delivered not simply a vaccine at record speed but also a spike popular for the vast amounts of syringes had a need to administer it.
One German factory has already been busily churning out the tiny plastic tubes and is confident global needs could be met.
"There won't be a shortage of syringes, whether or not we will be facing a big challenge," said Otto-Philipp Braun, co-director of Almo, Germany's leading syringe manufacturer.
At the business's production site in the central German town of Bad Arolsen, the loud hum of machinery fills the hall.
Employees man the assembly lines, putting on masks, hair nets and occasionally ear plugs.
They turn out disposable syringes 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, destined for use in Germany and a lot more than 140 other countries all over the world.
One equipment moulds high-quality plastic granules into thin, one-milliliter syringes, even while another spits out the pistons that fit snugly inside cylinder and are actually needed to push out the vaccine.
The plastic piston is green, matching the logo of German parent company B.Braun, a giant in the medical devices industry and still owned by the Braun family.
A complete of 64 syringes with pistons are assembled every 13 seconds.
Each year, Almo churns out a lot more than two billion syringes of varied kinds.
The needles which can be put into the injection units are made by a B.Braun subsidiary found in Malaysia.
The company intends to invest 30 million euros on yet another assembly line, partly to handle increased demand for the COVID-19 jabs.
The first orders have previously rolled in from Germany's BioNTech, whose vaccine developed with U.S. giant Pfizer has already been being administered in a few countries, and from CureVac, another German company whose vaccine applicant is definitely in final stage trials.
"We can manufacture 270 million syringes of one milliliter next year, and if necessary a supplementary 200 million from 2022," Braun told AFP.
Taking into account larger-size syringes that are also used designed for vaccine injections, Almo has orders for a few 500 million units for 2020 and 2021.
Its primary rival, U.S. behemoth Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD), said it acquired received orders for more than a billion injection equipment globally within COVID-19 inoculation efforts.
Source: japantoday.com
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