Leprosy mailing
list – January 11th, 2005
Ccn:
all.
Ref.: African Leprosy Congress.
From: S K
Noordeen,
Chennai
,
India.
Dear Dr. Noto,
As I had said
earlier ILA is a neutral forum for presenting and discussing any significant
information on leprosy. The word leprosy elimination is in vogue for
over 13 years. The reasons for using it are:
(a) it
has the approval of the World Health Assembly through its member
countries;
(b)
independently every leprosy endemic country has endorsed it and is
widely using the term
in its leprosy
strategies;
(c) most
stakeholders in leprosy have approved the strategy of
leprosy elimination when they joined the Global Alliance for
Elimination of
Leprosy in
1999 and even earlier;
(d) leprosy
elimination has been a topic both for special lectures and free
presentations in the last four International/Regional Leprosy
Congresses.
All these do not preclude some people to raise the issue again and
try to convince that the others are wrong. Hopefully there will be
opportunities at the African Leprosy Congress for discussions on
leprosy elimination and related issues.
Talking about
WHO Expert Committees on Leprosy the most recent Seventh Expert
Committee on Leprosy had this to say as its first recommendation:
"The Global Strategy for the Elimination of Leprosy, based on
implementation of MDT with case-finding, is proving to be extremely
successful in reducing the prevalence of leprosy and should be
continued" (WHO Expert Committee on Leprosy- Seventh Report 1998 page
37).
Regards,
Noordeen
