Seems peculiar to talk about leprosy in today’s world of cutting edge technology and easily available medicines, doesn’t it? Most of us do not even know what leprosy actually is. The name gives off a vague memory of people that we are not allowed to touch or to even speak. But let’s take a look on the other side of those boundaries that were made around these ‘lepers.’
Leprosy, also known as Hansen’s Disease, is an infection caused by bacteria that shows symptoms within 5 to 20 years of contacting the disease. The symptoms range from rashes on the body to small protrusions all over. The victims also face weakness, blindness and numbness towards pain. But contrary to belief, leprosy is not highly contagious. One can contract it only if he or she inhales the affected person’s sneeze or cough droplets that carry the germs. This also is dangerous only for a person with low immunity. But the facts are mostly ignored for fake beliefs that lead to leprosy being a disease of the body and the mind.
Leprosy affects people not just without but within too. On the outside, it starts with a rash or two that people generally ignore before it reaches to a much deeper stage where they feel nervous numbness or losing sensation on the skin. The granulomas make the everyday activities tough and even though the medication cures them, sometimes prolonged infection requires the limbs to be cut off that worsens the conditions.
But more than the physical shortcomings, there are mental bearings that affect a person much more than what the regular disease does to you. Sadly, the societal shunning affects them more than the actual effects of Leprosy. The patients are most of the times rejected by their own loved ones even, ordered to leave their homes and live in a separate area known as ‘leper colonies.’ Forced away by their families, the patients start to form their own world within the hospices. Such is the deplorable state of these victims.
Leprosy was formerly a targeted disease by the World Health Organization (WHO) and was hunted down in the early 1980s. By 2005, WHO announced that the disease was eliminated. But ‘eliminated’ was a general term used that didn’t take into account the remaining small percentage of people in far off Myanmar or India or China where this devil still prevails. People with leprosy still face the prejudice at the hands of their own. But where there is shut door, a window opens up. Many cured leprosy patients are now giving back to their fellow lepers through various means. Be it nursing them back to health or supplying them with the cure of ‘multidrug’ or even making comfortable footwear for the sick, they are trying to lift the taboo on leprosy from within. Sivananda Nursing Home, here in Hyderabad, is one such rehabilitation center, of the many that are sprouting up around India, that has taken 500 of such ‘untouchable’ tagged patients who find no welcoming bed in hospitals.
But the government of India too is taking up the cause again, targeting to completely eliminate the disease by the end of this year and reaching out to the poverty stricken patients. More and more awareness is being spread about the disease to prevent it and educate individuals about it. After all, even these people are humans, waiting to live their life as normally as possible.
