PANYU (China): The old men hunched over a board game looked like any other pensioners playing chess, until they lifted their heads to welcome medical staff approaching their table.
Scarred by leprosy, some of the men have collapsed noses and others have missing fingers, easily visible as they held up their hands to greet their doctors.
All of the inhabitants at the Panyu leprosy village in southern China have recovered from the potentially debilitating skin disease and are no longer infectious.
But many are badly disfigured and blind and are utterly incapable of rebuilding their lives after being forcibly institutionalised for decades, far away from their families.
Panyu is one of hundreds of “leprosy villages” in China, a legacy from the 1950s when very little was known about leprosy, or Hansen’s disease.
Mistaken as a very infectious or even incurable disease, those diagnosed with leprosy were exiled to remote villages and forgotten.
Ou Feng was diagnosed with leprosy at the age of 18 and sent to live on Panyu, a tiny island in southern Guangdong province.
Now 78, she is excited to greet visitors, grasping their extended hands and holding them for a long time.
“We have lunch ready for you. Please eat now, we are so happy when you come,” said Ou.
Until recently leprosy sufferers were shunned due to an incorrect belief their illness was highly infectious. Lepers were turned into outcasts and often sequestered in “leper colonies”.
But since the introduction of a hugely successful multi-drug therapy to treat leprosy in 1982, it is now considered no more than a skin disease that can be cured after a six- to 12-month course of antibiotics.
Some 95 per cent of the world’s population is naturally immune to the bacterium that causes leprosy — mycobacterium leprae — which is passed between people through respiratory droplets.
It multiplies very slowly and, in one recorded case, symptoms did not show until 30 years later.
The bacterium attacks the skin, peripheral nerves and mucous membranes, causing noses of victims to collapse.
Peripheral nerves of people afflicted with the disease die, meaning sufferers cannot feel pain so cuts on fingers and toes often go unnoticed until they develop into gaping ulcers.
These huge, open sores literally overrun the digits, which slowly shrink and disappear. The wounds sometimes become so malignant that limbs have to be amputated.—Reuters
