Mental scars remain for lepers after cure

Press, 1 December 1987, Page 46

Mental scars remain for lepers after cure

NZPA-Reuter Mandaue, Philippines Lepers, outcasts for thousands of years because of their disfiguring disease, can now be cured by drugs but the mental anguish of former sufferers is less easy to heal. After years of social rejection, a former farmer, Teofilo Manchavez, cannot face leaving the security of a leper colony in the central Philippines even though he is now free of the disease. “I tried going out there, but I couldn’t take it," said-Manchavez, who has lived at the Eversley Leprasarium on Cebu Island for 18 years. It is the only life he now knows. Looking down at his truncated fingers, ravaged from years of leprosy before he was treated, he recalled how people used to react before he moved into the leper centre. “They saw my hands and insulted me and yelled ‘leper’,” he said. As he spoke, sitting on a bench with his hands

clasped in front of him, patients in white robes peered out from the men’s infirmary nearby. Inside, about 30 lepers were lying listlessly, some covered from head to foot with cracked and oozing lesions. Others were missing fingertips and toes or had noses partly eaten away, a result of the disease’s attack on the nasal mucous membranes. The World Health Organisation says drugs now in use arrest the contagious bacterial disease, which attacks the nerves and skin. Medication makes sufferers non-infectious during treatment and in time kills the bacteria altogether. W.H.O. has called for leper colonies, where victims have traditionally lived together in isolation from the outside world, to be closed. Lepers should return to the community where they can lead normal lives, the organisation believes. But doctors say one of

the biggest problems is convincing lepers like Manchavez to leave their colonies once they have been cured or are no longer a health hazard. “One in four patients here no longer has the disease. But they refuse to be discharged,” said the director, Conrado Pineda, at the centre in Mandaue. Attitudes are slow to change among both the afflicted and the healthy towards a disease marked by stigma and fear since the beginning of recorded history. Lepers are mentioned repeatedly in the Bible as hopeless pariahs curable only by miracles. In the New Testament, Jesus is said to have cured a leper who came to him and begged to be made “clean." People with the disease were traditionally driven to caves, islands and other remote spots where they could not pass it on. There are now 5.34 million recorded cases world wide, mostly in Africa and Asia, W.H.O. says. '

The Philippines, with an estimated 38,000 lepers, is completing a joint two-year pilot study with W.H.O. on phasing out leper colonies and reintegrating their inmates into the community. Mr Pineda says the number of patients at Eversley has dropped to 400 in the last 30 years from 1200 as more lepers are treated at home. The centre discourages new patients unless they are seriously disabled by the disease. Doctors say the disease is being caught earlier and treated these days. Hideous deformities, once the tell-tale symptoms of leprosy, are being prevented. Unlike Mr Manchavez, some patients say the treatment has given them a new life. Aurelio Abastillas, who at 37 has had leprosy since he was 10, says drugs cleared up lesions covering his body. Scars remain and he has lost his fingertips, but

he says that for the first time he can now venture out into the world without being scorned. ' “There was a time when I just waited to die. Now I go out and do what I want,” he said. “People don’t avoid me the way they used to’,” he added at his home, a simple wooden house on stilts in the nearby town of San Isidro. Before a 1964 law banned involuntary confinement of lepers, sufferers on Cebu used to jump into boats and stay out at sea when health workers came to their villages to avoid being caught. Now, with the new treatment and a rural education drive, people are beginning to look at the disease in a different light, said Andres Galvez, W.H.O.’s director of chronic diseases. “People who once hid are coming forward and asking for help,” he said. “But the stigma is still there and will take a while to go away.”