SUCH MISCONCEPTIONS were understandable in the 1950s, but not now. Even though the effects of the disease may be chronic, leprosy isn’t a lifelong condition. After treatment, it’s part of a medical history. Repeating that refrain has helped a lawyer from New Orleans take his diagnosis in stride, and a young man from India break the news to his fiancée. After all, they only “bumped into some bacteria,” as their counselor puts it.
But leprosy is a disease with ancient implications. Even in a culture that rejects the teachings of the Bible, its references to leprosy—sidled up to words like cursed, outcast, and unclean—are well known. The question is, do they mean the same thing now?
Bill Simmons says no. When he took the reins at American Leprosy Missions’ Greenville, S.C., headquarters nine years ago, he studied books like Leviticus and 2 Kings for clarification. Everything hinged on the Hebrew word zaraath.
“Hansen’s disease just doesn’t mesh with the conditions described in the Old Testament,” he says. “Our patients don’t become white as snow, and their hair doesn’t turn white. Hansen’s disease doesn’t affect garments or walls of houses.”
While the New Testament focuses on healing leprosy rather than listing its symptoms, it uses the Greek word lepra to identify the malady. Simmons says it’s too bad Norwegian researcher Gerhard Hansen borrowed the term when in 1873 he named his bacillus M. leprae. Its microbes manufacture peripheral nerve–damaging Hansen’s disease, not the ancient variety of ailments known as leprosy.
Even so, Simmons stresses that Jesus wasn’t focused on what type of bacteria people had: “He was concerned that people were excluded.”
Exclusion is an assault on human dignity, the imago Dei. Some governments operated on limited knowledge of M. leprae’s capabilities, and they’ve paid for being overprotective. A Japanese court last year ordered the state to compensate relatives of leprosy patients it quarantined. Here in the United States, officials promised former Carville detainees lifelong care, either there or off-site. Fifteen are still living, and 14 receive an annual $52,275 stipend. Eight come to Baton Rouge for treatment—not for leprosy, but for its lasting effects.
NHDP division director Kevin Tracy is a captain with the Public Health Service. He’s the kind of guy who measures his words and checks them twice, especially when discussing money. Tracy doesn’t believe the size of his program’s budget is related to righting wrongs, but he admits the stigma attached to leprosy has financial leverage: “Our funding has downsized through the years, but there’s always a vocal outcry when further reductions are proposed. When our budget was cut in 2018, congressional inquiries motivated by public response reduced the cut from $3.6 million to $1.5 million.”
Long-range, Tracy says, he stands on the side of eradication. And if leprosy can one day be eradicated, maybe its stigma can, too.
Back at the clinic, that’s what Simon is hoping. The same goes for Amy Flynn a few doors down. When the nurse practitioner took the job as clinic manager last year, she wondered what her teenagers would think about their mom working around Hansen’s disease: “I don’t know if it’s necessarily generational, but I explained all about it to both my kids, and nothing. Not even any questions.” She pauses.
“There’s a lot of hope in that.”
Comments
MM
Posted: Fri, 03/13/2020 09:59 pmThank you for this fascinating article!
VolunteerBB
Posted: Sat, 03/14/2020 02:29 pmDitto!
OldMike
Posted: Sat, 03/14/2020 07:22 pmYour article on Hansen’s Disease (leprosy) is very enlightening, but didn’t touch on an aspect that is still rather scary in my part of the country.
There has been a story for decades that armadillos dug into graves at Carville, contracted Hansen’s, and although it does not seem to afflict them, can pass the disease from armadillo to armadillo, even from mother to babies. Not only that, but can transmit the disease to humans. And that as the species has moved northward over the past 100 years or so from its original southern territories, individual armadillos continue to carry the bacteria.
Whether true or not, various government agencies have confirmed the story as true, including my state’s Fish and Game Commission.
I would be interested in knowing if this is actually scientifically verified. In my part of the country, outdoorsmen routinely shoot armadillos on sight, and never touch either dead or live ones. Here—Arkansas—armadillos are not protected by law, nor are considered game animals, but rather are regarded as an invasive non-native species.
Thank you for the article.
SH
Posted: Mon, 05/18/2020 10:36 pmThanks for this good article that ties into the Carville facility. I spent time there in the 1990s, and really came to appreciate the development of the facility with its well thought out - and pleasing - architectural design. And the history of how the treatment for Hansen's Disease was developed at Carville in the ca. 1940s is interesting - and did include much use of armadillos. Great place, with a facinating history. If someday I make it back down to that part of Louisiana, it will be a great place to revisit.