There is a place in the heart of Delhi where the sun sets early, casting its orange glow across walls of crumbling brick and mortar. Tim and I sat on a ledge near the steps that led up to our rooftop dwelling, a tiny, stifling room with a stiff bed and plastic bags taping up leaks in the ceiling. It wasn’t comfortable, but that didn’t matter as the effects of jet lag and dehydration are constant friends in aiding our sleep. But before we fell into our reverie, we sat there on that ledge just looking, looking at the men who had been working on the rooftop across from us hanging their clothes to dry in the monkey-frequented trees that stretched their branched fingers skyward. Everything I had thought about India was, at that moment, entirely true. I had pictured the urban sprawl and the grandiose colonial-era architecture falling apart for lack of means by which to upkeep it. It felt like a movie scene and I felt then like the main character. But when you realize that these things haven’t been put there for you and the fulfillment of your imagination, that it’s not some sort of tourist attraction but rather everyday life for the people around you, you suddenly feel very small and slightly overwhelmed.
I arrived in India about two days ago with my traveling companion, Tim. We’re on a journey to better understand this place and specifically to learn more about an often overlooked and ostracized group of people, those inflicted with an ancient disease known most commonly worldwide as leprosy. Leprosy is a disease that is most likely spread through microorganisms in the air. However, the disease is much less contagious than previously believed. In fact, around 95 percent of the world’s population hold a natural immunity to the the disease. Another common misconception, even among the educated West, is that leprosy is incurable. In fact, it is very curable using an astonishingly effective three or four antibiotic cocktail, in the worst cases a process that takes no longer than 12 months. India has been effectively treating leprosy in this way since the early 1980s, seeing the country’s 4 million cases drop to below epedemic rate (less than one case per 10,000 population) at the end of 2005. Of course, in a country of over 1.1 billion people, just under one in 10,000 can add up. The country currently has about 83,000 cases of the disease under treatment, but a figure that may surprise is that there are still about 113,000 new cases being detected every year. This is due to the fact that leprosy can have an incubation period of up to 10 years. Therefore, it’s not so much that new people are getting the disease as much as it is that people who were previously infected are finally beginning to show symptoms of the disease, which begins with reddish patches of skin that have lost sensitivity.
A couple of days ago in Delhi, I spoke with Dr. Indranath Banerjee, the World Health Organization’s (W.H.O.) National Professional Officer on leprosy and neglected tropical diseases in India. He gave me much of the disease’s history in India and the steps that the Indian government as well as the W.H.O. and foreign aid agencies have taken to correct it. He is a small, genial man who obviously holds a true affection for his work and the progress the programs have made in bringing the rates of the disease down. During the interview, I asked him what the biggest battles are that India currently faces in dealing with leprosy. He said the biggest problem is still the stigma surrounding the disease. He said that leprosy, largely due to stories found in the Indian epics, has always been seen as a sort of divine punishment or retribution for ones sins. This created an out-casting of the lepers from normal society. He said that while today the general population has become more accepting of those inflicted with the disease as more trust is being put in science (the disease is harmless to others once under treatment), there are still 60 to 70,000 people living on the fringes of society, in separate groups often known as "colonies."
Tim and I have since traveled to a town called Sarnath, which is a part of a larger city known as Varanasi. Over the next few days, we will be able to visit a couple of these colonies in order to learn more about these people and how they are living in our present age.
Back to Uncategorized