Introduction
Household contacts are often more amenable to antileprosy interventions such as clinical examination and prophylactic therapy. The “new-case detection campaigns” and “contact tracing programs” that are operative in some endemic countries aim to detect and treat yet unidentified cases to reduce the source of infection. Contacts of these new cases can be targeted with chemoprophylaxis to break the “chain of transmission”. Chemoprophylaxis can be administered either to individual high-risk contacts, or as a blanket intervention of the entire population around a newly detected case.