On a blackboard under a baobab tree in the Senegalese town of Peycouk, Samba meticulously spells out a vocabulary lesson for his 20 students, a piece of chalk clenched between the nubby fingers of his leprosy-scarred hand.
”It’s not a hardship, it’s not a punishment — it’s something that can happen to anyone,” he said, keeping his hands in view instead of hiding them in the folds of his robe.
”I was one of the ones chosen by God for this.”
Samba is the elementary school teacher in this town of 2 000 people, 80km south of Dakar, eight percent of whom are infected with the disease that eats away at the flesh. The rest are either parents or children of sufferers of leprosy.
Even after patients have beaten the disease, they still remain victim to the stigma, which medical professionals hope to eradicate along with the treatable ailment itself, through awareness events such as Leprosy Day, the annual event to be celebrated this Sunday.
”I am proud now, where before I was ashamed,” said Peycouk resident Mor, twisting his dreadlocks with one fingerless hand and scattering chicken feed with the other.
”I used to beg in the street, and would hide myself from people. Now, here, I am proud — I have a farm and I am getting married!”
Half a million people are estimated by the United Nations’ World Health Organisation to be infected annually by the treatable disease, 10% of whom are children under age 15.
The WHO has set 2005 as the year that leprosy is to be eradicated, even as health professionals fear a surge in areas riven by conflict such as Chad, which is accepting hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees from Darfur, or Côte d’Ivoire, divided by two years of civil war.
Caused by a bacteria similar to tuberculosis, leprosy, or Hansen’s disease, named for the Norwegian biologist who isolated the bacteria, is a slow-evolving ailment that can remain in the body for up to 20 years without manifesting symptoms.
Highly infectious but not as contagious as historically feared, leprosy develops through dark stains on the skin, then proceeds to damage the nerves and mucous membranes, according to the Raoul Follereau Institute, which was founded in 1942 by an order of nuns horrified at the persecution of lepers with funding from the French doctor who pioneered the fight against the disease.
There are two forms of leprosy, which has since the 1980s been treatable with a cocktail of three antibiotics: paucibacillary, with one to five skin lesions; and multibacillary, considered contagious once a patient has more than five skin lesions.
Treatment, at a cost of roughly 24 euros ($31), can last up to a year for the more formidable multibacillary leprosy, according to the Order of Malta medical services agency. About 13-million people have successfully been cured of the disease, but for others, treatment can come too late, causing paralysis, blindness and the deterioration of extremities.
”Between ten and 30% of patients already experience some level of paralysis once they are diagnosed,” and are likely to remain so if the nerves have been touched by the infection, explained Doctor Pierre Bobin, head of a French association of
leprologists.
Arnaud Anvo walks with a limp and a wooden leg, using a pair of battered crutches that are strapped to his hands, both of which are missing several fingers.
He arrived in the Côte d’Ivoire town of Duquesne-Cremone in 1956 at the age of 16, cast out from his family when the telltale signs of the disease began to show.
”I’ve spent virtually my entire life here,” said the retired teacher, glancing around the village named after an Italian priest. The village is sitauted a short walk from the Follereau Institute, which has been treating leprosy sufferers from around West Africa for more than 50 years.
Of the village’s 2 000 residents, roughly 150 are people cured of leprosy, though their scars remain.
”A lot of people were afraid to leave here, even after they had been treated,” said Anvo.
”We had a hard time returning to our families, even though over time people were less afraid of being infected,” added the father of 14, who married a woman from a nearby village who never became infected.
”I guess it was just easier to stay here with our friends.” – Sapa-AFP