Science Cleanses the Leper

Abstract

Science is bringing leprosy patients out of the caves of superstition. The work is slow. Because of long-ingrained misconceptions born of ages during which leprosy made itself evident only when fingers and toes dropped off, many people still recoil in horror when the disease is mentioned. The ancient Chinese and Egyptians isolated lepers or killed them. Biblical times were almost as rough. was not until the early 1940s drugs were available to treat the disease. More than a year ago, early in 1966, a famous husband and wife team, Drs. Paul and Margaret Brand, who had spent 17 years in Vellore, India, treating leprosy, came to the Public Health Service leprosarium at Carville, La. He is an orthopedic surgeon and chief of rehabilitation; she is an ophthalmologist and chief of eye service. The shift from India to the U.S. has made them sharply aware of apparent genetic effects on the susceptibility to leprosy. White Caucasians are harder to treat for several reasons, Dr. Margaret Brand reports. No one knows whether there is, in fact, a genetic reason for American Caucasians to contract the more serious type of leprosy, called lepromatous, more often than Indian Caucasians do, but it happens. Racial reactions differ throughout the world. Hawaiians are estimated to be 70 times more susceptible to the disease than white Caucasians in Hawaii. And Chinese get the lepromatous kind more easily than Africans or other darker-skinned races. It is disgraceful, Dr. Paul says, that only one-fourth of the estimated 10 million to 20 million leprosy sufferers of the world are being treated, when two or three dollars a year will buy enough DDS (diamino-diphenylsulfone) for a leprosy patient. For $10 a year, a leprosy patient can be made infectiously negative. You get a big return for your money. Leprosy is not simply a tropical disease. occurs as far north as Iceland, is known in Korea and other nontropical countries, in spite of the fact it is most widespread in Asia and Africa. . : . ....... :i,i i 'i . .......: . i' .A