Until the early 1 980s, dapsone monotherapy administered to known patients was used for control of leprosy. Dapsone was usually administered in a dosage of 100 mg daily for a minimum of 5 years to patients with paucibacillary (PB) leprosy, and for life to patients with multibacillary (MB) leprosy. Because it was a weakly bactericidal and slowly acting drug, dapsone monotherapy led to poor patie...

BACKGROUND Contacts of leprosy patients are at increased risk of developing leprosy and need to be targeted for early diagnosis. Seropositivity to the phenolic glycolipid I (PGL-I) antigen of Mycobacterium leprae has been used to identify contacts who have an increased risk of developing leprosy. In the present study, we studied the effect of seropositivity in patient contacts, on the risk of d...

Leprosy is an ancient infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae. According to comparative genomics studies, this disease originated in Eastern Africa or the Near East and spread with successive human migrations. The Europeans and North Africans introduced leprosy into West Africa and the Americas within the past 500 years. In Brazil, this disease arrived with the colonizers who disembar...

BACKGROUND: Leprosy or Hansen’s disease is an infectious caused by Mycobacterium leprae (M. leprae) bacilli which results in chronic infections humans that affect the peripheral nerves, skin, and other organs such as eyes, mucous membranes, bones, testicles. has a variety of clinical presentations, depending on cell-mediated immunity host. classified World Health Organization (WHO) paucibacilla...

Where is the world’s only leprosy museum? Calcutta? Louisiana? No. It’s in Bergen, Norway. I visited the Leprosy Museum in Bergen last year, when visiting my friend, Jan Eggum, a well-known Norwegian singer and composer. The museum houses the original laboratories and surgeries where Dr. Armauer Hansen and his colleagues dld the frst systematic research on leprosy. The “leprosarium” where Hanse...

Histoid leprosy, an uncommon variant of lepromatous leprosy, develops usually as relapse in lepromatous patients who are on dapsone monotherapy, but uncommonly arises de novo. This rare form of the disease, with unique clinical and histopathological features, may pose a diagnostic challenge even to astute clinicians. We report the case that occurred de novo in an elderly who presented with smal...

Objectives Leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, is a slowly progressive and chronic infectious neglected tropical disease (NTD) caused by Mycobacterium leprae. This study was performed to assess the epidemiological trend of leprosy in past five years three districts Tanzania which prevention intervention (PEP4LEP) implemented, determine case detection delay at baseline. Methods Secondary da...

Reported is the spatial variation of leprosy in an urban area of Brazil and its correlation with socioeconomic indicators. From November 1991 to October 1992 a total of 752 newly diagnosed leprosy patients who were attending all outpatient clinics in Goiânia city, central Brazil, were identified. A database o leprosy cases was set up linking patients' addresses to 64 urban districts. Leprosy ca...

This study illustrates the consequences of smallpox revaccination in 45 lepromatous, 28 tuberculoid, and 47 normal individuals. Results obtained with intradermal inoculations indicated that the patients with leprosy were associated with a relative anergy against the vaccinia virus, the anergy being minimal in the tuberculoid leprosy but marked in the cases with lepromatous leprosy. Major vaccin...

BACKGROUND Both magnitude and severity of disability in new leprosy patients measure indirectly the disease transmission in the community and rapidity of case detection. Various factors might be associated with the presence of impairment at registration. AIMS To find out the prevalence of both grade 1 and grade 2 disability among new leprosy patients along with association of some clinical an...