Leprosy Mailing List – October 23rd,
2006
Ref.: Leprosy
statistics (see attachment)
From: Soutar
D., London, UK
<<Graph CD World (minus) India.doc>>
Dear Salvatore,
When the recent Weekly Epidemiological Record published the
leprosy data of 2005, I, and many others, found the continuing rapid
decline in the new case detection figures for India to be quite
surprising. The attached graph which separates out the detection
figures for India and the rest of the world clearly shows how dramatic
this decline has been over the last few years, while it remains fairly
constant in the rest of the world. I am not an epidemiologist
but I am intrigued to know what makes India so different from all the
other endemic countries in being able to achieve a consistent annual
decline in case detection at a rate which I have always been led to
believe was not epidemiologically possible. I hear of incidences
in a number of countries of new cases of leprosy not being registered
and of records being unscrupulously ‘cleaned’. I hope some
of the epidemiologists and field workers among your readers can
provide me with believable explanations and allay my increasing fear
that something is amiss and that there are perhaps many people
affected by leprosy who are not receiving the services they need.
Yours sincerely,
Douglas Soutar
Mr Douglas Soutar
General Secretary
International Federation of
Anti-Leprosy Associations
doug.soutar@ilep.org.uk
www.ilep.org.uk
Tel: + 44 (0)20 7602 6925
