Leprosy, Historical

Recent genome research shows that leprosy originated in East Africa spreading from there in migratory waves. Early sources in Indian and Chinese medical texts dating from before 600 BC include diseases with leprosy-like symptoms. Leprosy was mistakenly attributed to biblical descriptions of diseases. It is impossible to determine to what extent leprosy was present in medieval Europe, and nineteenth-century studies have exaggerated the medieval proscriptions against leprosy. The first leprosy conference in Berlin, in 1897, recommended the Norwegian isolation model for leprosy control. Legislation and leprosy institutions were introduced world wide, the congresses in Bergen (1909), Strasbourg (1923), and Cairo (1938). Some of the leprosy organizations still working against the disease trace their beginnings to the late nineteenth century. Leprosy-affected people did not passively endure the policies of the past, and a notable example of activism occurred with Stanley Stein's publication of the Star in Carville, Louisiana; another is the battle for compensation won by the people in Japan in 2001. Effective chemotherapy was developed after World War II and in spite of the hurdle of drug resistance to dapsone, since its inception in 1982, the World Health Organization's (WHO) multidrug therapy (MDT) has effectively treated over 14 million people.