You can keep the tip?
ewwwwwww
(humming yesterday…)
A leper is eating dinner in a restaurant. He hears a fellow patron vomiting a few tables away.
The leper goes to the sick individual and says, “Look, I’m sorry my appearance is making you ill. I should have never come here; I’ll leave immediately.”
“No!” the sick man protests. “It isn’t you. Please, stay and enjoy your dinner.” The leper returns to his seat.
Again, the man starts vomiting. The leper goes to him again and says “It’s very kind of you deny it’s me, but I know I’m making you sick. I’ll go.”
“No! Really, it isn’t you. Please, stay.” The leper returns to his table.
A third time, the man starts vomiting again. The leper goes to him again. “That’s it; I’m leaving. I never should have come to eat in a public place to begin with. I hope you can enjoy your dinner once I’m gone.”
The man responds, “Really, it isn’t you! It’s the guy at the table behind you dipping his crackers in your back.”
Isn’t there a leper colony in Hawaii? According to an Almanac I read a few years back, the colony is an “unorganized county” that forms a tiny part of IIRC Maui.
I should have disabled smiles for that lasdt post. It should have been , the nausiated smile.
Yep I have actually seen it from the air. However my understanding was that it was settled by europeans just for lepers and that it would be closed out as the lepers aged and passed away. Not sure about those “facts” though.
I was under the impression that a lot of times…what was mentioned in the Bible as “leprosy” was really “syphilis” (sp?)
How can you tell a leper just used your shower?
The soap’s bigger.
The leper “colony” in Hawaii was on the island of Molokai, on the Kalaupapa Peninsula. (I believe that the county jurisdiction is Maui.) The state of Hawaii still maintains a hospital and Hansen Disease treatment center, there. Fr. Damien de Veuster, of Belgium, ministered to the (at that time) exiles in the leper colony. When he contracted the disease, there was a bit of a scandal because “right thinking” people assumed that one had to engage in sexual congress with a leper to contract the disease. (There is no evidence that Fr. Damien ever had sex with any of his patients.)
I believe there’s leper colonies scattered here and there throughout the U.S., actually.
A photographer I know did an essay a couple years ago on one outside of Baton Rouge, LA. Part of the reason he chose to photograph when he did was because they were shutting it down…IIRC, it was because their patient base was gradually thinning out due to old age/death, and they weren’t getting any new patients since leprosy’s so much more treatable these days (as a few other people have alluded).
And then there’s that one episode of the X-Files that’s set in a leper colony in somewhere like Pennsylvania…I know it’s just a TV show, but gimme partial credit for remembering anyway. 
Those weren’t lepers. They were aliens. Or maybe they were alien lepers. Or something. It was a rather confusing episiode (aren’t they all?).
There’s a crucial distinction though. Smallpox does not have an animal reservoir. In other words, you could only contract smallpox by person-to-person transmission. It only existed in humans. It is this quality that made it possible to eradicate.
As others, including Cecil, have noted, the causative agent of leprosy (Mycobacterium leprae) does have an animal reservoir. This means that even if we had a vaccine for leprosy, the pathogen couldn’t be eradicated like smallpox could.
Also, IIRC, M. leprae is very difficult to culture. Unlike many bacteria, M. leprae can not be grown outside of human tissue as of yet. This has made research difficult.
I’ve mentioned it before, but if anyone happens to find themselves in Bergen, Norway, check out the leposy museum. If you can’t make it to Norway, check out the ultra-flaky http://www.pandoras-box.org/mysite.htm - all the leprosy knowledge you (n)ever wanted to know
I think it was a leper. Fox thought it was an alien because it was quarantined in a train car and treated like, well, a leper.
As for leprosy being eradicated, remember that malaria has been fully curable for quite some time, and it’s still the world’s leading cause of death.
Just for the sake of trivia.
M. leprae has never been cultivated on labratory media. However, it is grown in vivo using both armadillos and the footpads of mice. This makes it more dificult to study, but it can be done.
Being a Mycobacterium it is multiply antibiotic resistant, but it can be treated with an isoniazid/rifampin series.
Oops that’s the treatment for TB. Here’s the leprosy treatment:
rifampicin, clofazimine and dapsone for MB (multibacillary) leprosy patients, and rifampicin and dapsone for PB (paucibacillary)leprosy patients