LONDON (Reuters) - Leprosy is on the retreat but the stigma, fear and isolation associated with the disfiguring condition is now proving more damaging than the disease itself, health and human rights groups said on Monday.
By Peter Apps
LONDON (Reuters) - Leprosy is on the retreat but the stigma, fear and isolation associated with the disfiguring condition is now proving more damaging than the disease itself, health and human rights groups said on Monday.
Discrimination pushes sufferers further into poverty, and governments and aid groups need to do a better job of stopping it, according to a coalition of nine groups including Amnesty International and Save the Children.
"We have been able to cure them but many people are still isolated," WHO global leprosy ambassador Yohei Sasaskawa said at the launch of a global appeal to end the discrimination against people with leprosy, also known as Hansen's disease.
!ADVERTISEMENT!"Even people who have been cured of leprosy are scared to speak out because they fear there will be even more discrimination."
For thousands of years, people with leprosy, which causes skin lesions and thickening and can cause people to lose extremities -- were forced to live in isolated colonies and treated as pariahs.
Since the 1980s, a cocktail of antibiotics has helped cure an estimated 16 million people and whittled the number of cases down to about 250,000 worldwide each year, experts said.
The disease is caused by a slow-growing bacillus called Mycobacterium leprae and is not highly contagious.
But many leprosy patients are disowned by their families, denied jobs and left isolated in institutions even after they are cured.
FEAR
In India, which accounts for 70 percent of cases, more than 700 leprosy colonies remain.
Jose Ramirez, an American diagnosed with leprosy in 1968 and later cured, said most people still step back from him when they discover he once had the disease -- even though his only scars are on the legs and out of view.
He counts himself lucky to have had a successful career as a social worker but says employers were reluctant to take him on when they saw that he had spent time in a leprosy hospital.
"Leprosy, because of all its history, has a nuance to it and stigma that is quite unique," he said. "But people need to be educated about it and told we should not be in institutions."
Tackling fear is key to fighting the disease and ensuring people receive treatment before it is too late to save fingers, toes and other extremities, the groups said.
In Tanzania, for example, traditional healers are also trained to both identify the disease and help deliver the Western drugs necessary to cure it.
"More people are coming forward because they know it can be cured," said head of the Tanzania Leprosy Association Sira Ubwa Mamboya. "But some come when it is too late because they have been scared and hidden away. We can still cure them but we cannot restore their extremities."
(Editing by Michael Kahn and Andrew Roche)
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