India is the world’s leprosy hotspot. Can it get rid of this Biblical disease?
India has 60% of all leprosy cases in the world but has promised to eradicate this disease by 2027. Experts say actions speak louder than words
Tanu Bai got leprosy at 20 years old. She would burn her hands but couldn’t feel it. Sometimes, her arms would become horribly inflamed; other times she would become feverish, shivering uncontrollably. There were no parents to take care of her; her mom and dad had died when she was 10. Her brother too.
When I asked her how she developed leprosy, she says simply, “I just got it,” looking at me as if I asked a stupid question. To Tanu Bai, leprosy was not infectious; instead, God had willed her to have this condition — and that was that.
Leprosy is one of the most ancient stigmatized diseases in the world. In the Old Testament, there is a verse, “The leprous person who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean’ … He shall live alone. His dwelling shall be outside the camp.” So, imagine people’s surprise when Jesus stopped to care for these literal outcasts.
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Tanu Bai at Satya Jeevan Leprosy Society in New Delhi, India. Because of her late diagnosis, Tanu Bai’s fingers are irreversibly shortened, and she’s lost sensation in her feet, although she’s long been cured of leprosy.
There are about 200,000 new cases of leprosy in the world each year, and India is home to about 60% of them. After a concerted campaign, India announced that it had eradicated leprosy in 2005, bringing cases down to 1 per 10,000 people (from 57.8 per 10,000 twenty years earlier.) This was a WHO technical definition of “eradication,” but with 1.15 billion people at the time, that’s still a lot of leprosy.
Critics argue that, if the government had kept the foot on the gas pedal for a little bit longer, they could’ve actually gotten rid of the disease. But the Indian government, having achieved this key victory, shuttered its leprosy-specific programs and and turned its attention/funding to other conditions.
India’s under fresh pressure now, with the United Nations calling for comprehensive elimination of leprosy by 2030, as part of the Sustainable Development Goals. Despite India being the global hotspot, the government has promised — with either remarkable energy or hubris — to end leprosy three years earlier by 2027.
Can India get it right this time?
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