As i was watching th Simpsons last night, where Homer and Bart go to a leper colony, I wondered, are there any leper colonies in the world still. I would think we’d licked leprosy by now.
There was a hospital in Carville, Louisiana, where my parents both worked, but it appears it was closed down in 1998 or 1999. According to the linked article, the disease is treatable now.
I imagine that less-developed areas still have problems with leprosy.
There is a leper colony called Kalaupapa in Hawaii, on the island of Moloka’i. This, to the best of my knowledge, is the colony referenced on The Simpsons. There are currently less than 100 Hansen’s Disease patients living in Kalaupapa, which no longer receives new patients but is now home to those who’ve chosen to stay there.
Although inspired by a television series, this question has a factual answer that is not really related to entertainment (unless you find leprosy unduly entertaining). I think I’ll steal this thread for General Questions.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
This recent article describes an example in Zimbabwe of what might still be called a “leper colony”. As it makes clear, even if the disease is now treatable, social issues remain a problem for those infected in the past and so one can still have communities made up of those who continue to be rejected by their society as “lepers”.
Actually i do find it unduly entertaining. My arms fell off earlier. That was a good laugh.
Unduly entertained by leprosy…it certainly puts “laughed my ass off” in a whole new light…
I don’t know about “unduly” but leprosy has always made my sides split.
Stop it, you’re killing me…
Did you ever wonder why lepers are so good at hockey?
It’s cuz they always win the face offs.
Well, apparently Japan had a Leprosy Prevention Law until 1996 and isolated lepers against their will.
Although leprosy is rare in the U.S. it’s still a big problem in countries such as India. Malnutrition and a suppressed immune system are contributing factors to the spread of the disease. Leprosy is caused by a bacterium named Mycobacterium leprae. It’s in the same genus as the tuberculosis bacterium but fortunately is a harder to contract. Leprosy doens’t appear to be airborne like TB is. Also, just because I find it fascinating, leprosy organisms can’t be cultured on agar-based media like most bacteria but it will grow in armadillos.
Leprosy is still a major problem in parts of India :
[Quote from WHO]
(http://w3.whosea.org/leprosy/burden.htm)
There are a lot of organizations working to help the lepers. But more difficult than fighting the disease is the attitude people have to this disease. Many still falsely believe that leprosy is due to bad karma and that it is contagious.
Notable work on the Lepers of Calcutta (Now Kolkata), India is that of Mother Teresa. Also, the book by Dominique Lapierre - City of Joy - gives a view of the social life of the lepers.
I don’t find the humor in this. Its really sad. The only thing which comes close to “humor” is that leprosy makes people more horny than normal (as per what I read in the aforementioned book).
You’re saying that it is NOT contagious at all? I had always heard that it was one of the least contagious diseases but never that it is not at all contagious. I thought you had to live with an infected person(s) for years and years to have any chance of catching it.
Here’s an interesting tidbit (that may or may not be true: one of you fact-checkers can confirm or deny it for the rest of us)–the only people who get leprosy in the U.S. these days are taxidermists, who may contract it if they injure themselves while taxidermying an infected armadillo, which, as someone else has noted above, is the only other mammal capable of carrying the disease and, in fact, carries it in high concentration (because of its very low basal body temperature). In addition, a fairly significant percentage of armadillos seem to carry this disease.
Sorry Pablito. Bad Grammar there. I have heard that certain forms of leprocy are contagious while others are not. But, I am not an expert on this.