World Leprosy Day was observed throughout the Globe including Pakistan on Sunday. For more than 50 years, on the fourth Sunday of January, thousands of people across the globe remember those who suffer the horrendous effects of leprosy.
World Leprosy Day, is a day to increase public awareness about leprosy and to encourage the flow of funds, imperative to take the cause of leprosy eradication, forward.
World Leprosy Day helps to focus on the need of the very poorest of all people - those affected by leprosy. It helps to tell the story to people who simply do not know that leprosy still exists. It also helps raise funds so that those with leprosy can be treated and cared for.
Leprosy is caused by a slow-growing bacillus, Mycobacterium leprae. It is transmitted via droplets from the nose and mouth of untreated patients with severe disease, but is not highly infectious. If left untreated, the disease can cause nerve damage, leading to muscle weakness and atrophy, and permanent disabilities.
G.A Hansen first identified the bacteria in the year 1873, making it the first germ to be identified as a causative micro-organism for any disease. It is also called as Hansen's disease.
The Leprosy Mission encourages individuals, and community groups to observe World Leprosy Day through spoken word, story and video. Every year, more than 300,000 children, women and men discover they have leprosy. For many centuries, leprosy stigmatised those affected because there was no cure.
Those who had the disease had to live with the disabilities that are so common in leprosy - they simply had no choice. All they could hope for is a kind and compassionate friend who would take pity on them. But in 1982 the cure for leprosy was discovered.
Today leprosy can be fully cured and, when diagnosed early in the cycle of the disease, the patient will be completely normal. Leprosy continues to grow in areas of desperate poverty where people have not yet heard that leprosy can be cured or they are too poor to seek medical help.