MANILA, Philippines—Although the Philippines has drastically reduced the incidence of leprosy over the years, it continues to account for the bulk of cases in the Western Pacific Region brought about by misconceptions and stigma worsened by religion, according to the Department of Health (DOH).
Health Secretary Enrique Ona on Monday said the stigma of leprosy was still “very obvious” in the Philippines—a mainly religious country—particularly from the pulpit.
“There is always a time where leprosy is talked about in sermons…in the church. We have to do something about that,” said Ona at a press conference with top officials of the World Health Organization-Western Pacific Region.
WHO experts and national leprosy control program managers from the region yesterday gathered for a three-day meeting to introduce a new global leprosy control strategy, review the latest epidemiological data and help boost member countries’ capacity to control the disease.
Ona said leprosy should no longer have the stigma it did during “biblical times,” when those afflicted with the disease were branded as “lepers” and described as disfigured and unclean.
Curable disease
“During biblical times when they said leprosy, very severe deformities that were present in some old, old cases easily come to our mind but what we should understand is that leprosy is a curable disease,” Ona told reporters.
According to the WHO, the Philippines accounts for 40 percent of the total cases monitored each year in the region, which consists of 37 countries with a total population of about 1.8 billion.
Despite having met the elimination target of less than one case per 10,000 population, the region continues to register 5,000 new leprosy cases each year, of which 2,000 are in the Philippines.
Fail to meet target
Three Western Pacific countries—the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati and the Mashall Islands—have yet to meet the target, said Dr. Shin Young-soo, WHO regional director for the Western Pacific.
“We opened the champagne too early, we think that the disease is gone but it is not totally gone,” Shin said at the briefing.
Ona said new cases of leprosy continued to sprout in the country because society—including policymakers, health workers and the media—had underestimated its threat given the minimal number of cases being reported.
Dr. Alberto Romualdez, a basic biomedical scientist and president of the Culion Foundation, stressed that while there was sufficient free medicine to treat patients, information about the disease has been deficient and methods of looking for cases had become obsolete.
“The methods we use now have been stuck with the methods used in the past,” said Romualdez.
500 cases in Metro
There are currently nine provinces and two cities where leprosy is prevalent. These include Ilocus Sur, Tarlac, Nueva Ecija, Calabarzon, Tawi-Tawi, Sulu, Cebu City and Davao City.
In Metro Manila alone, over 500 new cases have been monitored in various health centers and hospitals.
Health officials on Monday said that to curb the incidence of leprosy in the region, detection of the disease must be prompt.
Mycobacterium leprae, the bacteria that causes leprosy, multiplies very slowly and has an incubation period of three to 20 years.
No longer ostracized
But they stressed that although historically many people with leprosy had been ostracized by their communities and families, the situation had changed.
“Leprosy is now completely curable and is not practically contagious,” said Ona.
In the religious sense, the disease that is often depicted in the Bible does not refer merely to a medical condition, but a “physical manifestation of a moral or spiritual malaise,” explained Msgr. Pedro Quitorio, the Catholic bishops’ media director.