Dubai: A New Delhi-based Indian doctor says that a simple ‘preventive diet’ to boost the immunity against flu, along with the possibility of the herd immunity already kicking in – may work for the second-most populous country in the world in their fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

Dr Biswaroop Roy Chowdhury – a medical nutritionist whose crash diet plans to reverse diabetes recently became hugely popular via youtube videos – has provided some food for thought at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has brought the world to it’s knees.

Speaking to Gulf News during an exclusive interview, Dr Roy Chowdhury said that in the absence of a vaccine, it’s the ‘’ treatment and not the disease’’ which is taking more lives around the world. ‘’Check the WHO protocol and you will see it’s a combination of anti-malarial, antibiotics, anti-pyretic and even in cases a HIV drug. Why do you need antibiotics to treat what is essentially a viral fever? Even the dosage of anti-pyretic is also extremely high and it can often turn out to be a lethal combination,’’ he said.

“Check the WHO protocol and you will see it’s a combination of anti-malarial, antibiotics, anti-pyretic and even in cases a HIV drug. Why do you need antibiotics to treat what is essentially a viral fever? Even the dosage of anti-pyretic is also extremely high and it can often turn out to be a lethal combination” – Dr Biswaroop Roy Chowdhury

What would be his advice for the people of India, where the cases have crossed 5000 within a span of a month and the Central government is mulling an extension of the nationwide lockdown? ‘’We don’t know if the cases have started to develop in India in March or actually before that, say six months. The figures are coming out now because of the tests – but please remember most of tests started at the airports. It would have been interesting to find the outcome if tests were also conducted at rural India.

‘’The point I am trying to make here is the coronavirus – whose antecedents lay in the SARS or MERS almost 10 years back – could have come back some six months back but we didn’t know till the ultra-conservative Chinese media brought it before us. Infectious diseases like tuberculosis, malaria or flu does kill about 350,000 people in India annually – and flu does kill. However, there is no guarantee that all the deaths happening in India or the world at this point are due to coronavirus,’’ Dr Roy Chowdhury argued.

Elaborating on his case, he says the RT-PCR (reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) test which is performed on suspect cases is also not a full-proof examination to determine the nature of the virus. ‘’Discovered by Kary Banks Mullis, a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, the test aims to do a genetic evaluation of the virus and not determine the coronavirus. It was originally meant for research work and not diagnostic purposes and can often show false positives,’’ he stuck his neck out.

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