Leprosy
mailing list, July 16th, 2005
To: all.
Ref.: Leprosy
burden "ranking list".
From: J
Kawuma, Uganda.
Dear Salvatore,
Thank you very much for the e-mail (W Hippke, LML, July 12th,
2005).
I have tried using such a ranking system to determine the districts
with the highest leprosy burden because I was not satisfied with using
prevalence or case detection per se for this purpose.
Dr Hippke’s suggestion enriches my scoring system by the addition of
disability grading at time of detection. I would not give the same
score to prevalence as that given to case detection. I think the
latter should take a bigger score. I am uneasy about including the
child proportion here as I feel, at least in the situation in Uganda,
that it is influenced by operational factors e.g. it might be higher
in areas where systematic examination of school children still takes
place and much lower where people are "doing nothing". In
this case the people who are doing nothing would win a low
transmission score.
This is a very important suggestion not only for raking countries but
also ranking areas at sub-national level e.g. regions, zones or
districts.
Joseph Kawuma
GLRA, Uganda
