Insight to the Infectious Leprosy Disease

Paper Summary:

This paper looks at leprosy (or Hansen's disease) which, until the AIDS epidemic was the most feared infectious disease. It traces its history from Biblical times to the discovery of its cause in 1873 by Dr. Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen, the bacillus Mycobacterium leprae. It examines various aspects of the disease, including resistance to drugs, statistics and symptoms. The paper is illustrated with drawings and diagrams.

From the Paper:

"Up until the 20th century, the treatment for leprosy was the dispensation of oil extracted from the nuts from the Hydnocarpus tree through mouth, injection or ointment. However, the first breakthrough with regards to a cure came in the 1940's with the development of dapsone. Dapsone was used to arrest the disease and was a treatment that took many years, possibly a lifetime until the 1960's when, through mal-treatment, the mycobacterium developed a resistance to the only known leprosy cure. Then, in the late 1960's, rifampicin and clofazimine were discovered, and when combined with dapsone in 1981, the leprosy patients finally received their long awaited cure called Multi-Drug-Treatment or MDT."

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