“NOT ERADICATED”

• World leprosy day is celebrated on the last Sunday of Jan each year
• The day is observed each year to improve the efforts and provide an opportunity for renewed commitment for the elimination and complete eradication of this chronic debilitating disease as soon as possible.
• The day aims to have zero leprosy cases in both children and adults and minimize leprosy-related disabilities.
• The best way to go about this is early detection and it is only possible by creating awareness about the disease and clearing the misconception among people that leprosy still exists – It still needs to be eradicated!
• This year, the theme for the day is Discrimination, Stigma, Prejudice
• While the general public might believe that leprosy has been eradicated from the face of the planet, it is far from gone!
• The number of cases has reduced globally to less than 2,00,000 cases at the end of 2016.
• The WHO launched a 5-year ‘Global Leprosy Strategy 2016-2020’ in April 2016 to push towards a ‘Leprosy-free world’.
• However, there was an increase in the number of leprosy cases in the year 2016 from the figures recorded in the previous
  

  Image source: Weekly Epidemiological Record: Global leprosy update, 2016: accelerating reduction of disease burden. WHO Weekly Epidemiological Record, vol. 92, 35 (pp. 501–520), World Health Organization, 2017

  year.

• In India, by the end of March 2016, 551 districts out of a total of 669 recorded a prevalence of <1/10,000 cases, which is the target of elimination of the diseases as a public health problem.
• However, India still accounts for 60% of the new cases that are reported yearly.
• In the year 2016, the number of leprosy cases was 135485, which was significantly higher than the 2015 figure of 1,27,326.
• This rise is not due to an increase in the number of cases per se, but due to an innovative Leprosy Case Detection Campaign by the NLEP(National Leprosy Eradication Programme
• Many strategies are being implemented by various government organization to increase awareness and reporting of cases and to tackle endemic ‘hot spots’ where the disease is more prevalent

Reference: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5885632/