Leprosy Mailing List – October 23rd, 2007
Ref.: "Neglected
Diseases"
From:
Ogbeiwi O., Garki, Abuja, Nigeria
Dear Salvatore,
I refer to Drs Convit and
Gusmao’s messages, LML October 16th and 17th
respectively.
Commenting on these, I feel
very sad that in some countries and some international organisations
(I will not mention names), leprosy has been grouped among the
'neglected disease' and it's actually become 'neglected' in the
government agenda (political, budget and national programme
commitment). This particularly true for those that have declared leprosy
eliminated in their project areas because the registered prevalence
rate has gone below one case per 10,000. Due to the resulting passiveness
of case finding and the 'integration' of leprosy services, the
case detection rate has become extremely low.
I fear that with leprosy
neglected at programme level, the levels of transmission and
disability due to late detection will thrive immensely to the
disadvantage of human population, especially those in developing
countries.
Leprosy is one of the few
diseases that maybe enjoyed a lot research interests in the past and
still has a lot of its epidemiological aspects unknown or
unclear. Is there any
thing we can still do to remove leprosy from the list of neglected
diseases?
Osahon
