Italian Association Amici di Raoul Follereau (AIFO)

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CANONIZATION OF FATHER DAMIEN
Leprosy in Hawaii

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Fr Damien

Leprosy

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Leprosy is an ancient disease, known to humanity for thousands of years. The first written records of leprosy go back to 3000 years. Pioneering research on different sub-types of genome of leprosy bacillus from different parts of the world done by Prof. Stewart Cole and his team, places the origin of leprosy to the dawn of humanity, probably in India or in Eastern part of Africa. The disease reached the American continent with the European colonizers some five hundred years ago and in certain parts of Caribbean and South America with the slave trade in eighteenth century.

It is thought that leprosy arrived in Hawaii islands in nineteenth century with the ships coming from China, Philippines and Japan, with persons coming to America during the gold rush around 1950. These ships stopped in Hawaii on the way. Leprosy spread quickly among the Kanaka, the native population of Hawaii.

Around 1870, the king of Hawaii asked the Government to find a way to limit the spread of the disease. Thus the policy of enforced isolation of all persons affected with leprosy was adopted and these persons were rounded up from different parts of Hawaii and sent to Molokai island by boat. On Molokai, they were placed on a narrow strip of land called Kalaupapa, close to the sea, closed by en enclosure, so that they could not go out of their closed settlement.

Fr Damien arrived in Molokai in 1873, when the leprosy settlement was relatively new and the persons affected with leprosy were forced to live in huts. At that time there were about 600 persons living in Kalaupapa. There was a rundown hospital building without beds and an old broken down church. The soil seemed to be infertile. Fr Damien ordered materials from Oahu island and slowly three hundred houses were built. Fr Damien raised up issues with local authorities for improving the living conditions of the persons in Kalaupapa.

In an article in New York Times dated 25 September 1901 by Dr Albert S. Ashmead, he quoted Mr. Alvarez, superintendent of the hospitals for treatment of leprosy in Honolulu, "We have had strict laws of compulsory segregation for the last thirty years, and the results are anything but encouraging. I believe, however, that leprosy as well as any other contagious disease could be stamped out by strict isolation, but we find it impossible to isolate every leper as soon as the first symptom appears, and we do not know if the disease is also communicated to others during the long period of incubation, when the most searching investigation would fail to reveal it." At that time, they had 1,100-1,200 persons affected with leprosy living in the settlements in Molokai.

This article also quotes Fr Conrardi, the Belgian priest who had substituted Fr Damien in Molokai and lived there for seven years, "Leprosy was becoming less widespread in Hawaii, not because of the law of the segregation which did not prevent the actual contact between the healthy and the leprous people but because the Kanakas are dying out as a race."

An analysis of data on new cases of leprosy in Hawaii (below) shows a slow and gradual decline over a hundred year period, that does not seem to show any specific influence of introduction of Dapsone in 1950s and MDT in 1980s. Today a small number of new cases of leprosy are diagnosed annually in Hawaii.