210,000 New Cases Of Leprosy Every Year

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In the text, addressed to the presidents of Bishops’ Conferences and bishops responsible for pastoral care in health, he reminds: “The disease is an ‘ancient’ disease, but not for this is it less devastating physically and often also morally. In all epochs and all civilizations, the fate of people with leprosy has been that of being marginalized, deprived of any kind of social life, condemned to seeing their own bodies disintegrate until death arrives. Unfortunately, still today those who suffer from it or – although they have been cured of it – bear its unmistakable mutilations, are far too often condemned to loneliness and fear, to live as though they were invisible to the eyes of other people, of society and of public opinion.”

Msgr. Zygmunt Zimowski notes: “Amongst the factors that favor its perpetuation, there is certainly individual and collective acute poverty which far too often involves a lack of hygiene, the presence of debilitating illnesses, insufficient alimentation if not chronic hunger, and a lack of rapid access to medical care and treatment. At a social level, there persist, at the same time, fears which, usually generated by ignorance, add a heavy stigma to the already terrible burden which leprosy involves, even after a person has been cured of it. I thus appeal to the international community and to the authorities of each individual State and invite them to develop and strengthen the strategies that are needed in the fight against leprosy, making them more effective and capillary, above all, where the number of new cases is still high. All of this should be done without neglecting campaigns of education and sensitization that are able to help the people who are afflicted and their families to move out of exclusion and obtain the treatment that is necessary.”  

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