January 22, 2002, The Leprosy Mission, Peterborough, UK

World Leprosy Day 2003

Image Caption: Leprosy Mission Logo

Leprosy Mission Logo

Submitted

At the time of the inaugural World Leprosy Day in 1953, the work of The Leprosy Mission (TLM) in showing the love and compassion of Jesus to leprosy sufferers was almost eighty years old. This ministry to the poorest of the poor, in the darkest days when a medical cure for the disease was still some years distant, epitomised the Scripture from Hebrews 13: 5 wherein God said , ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you’. Since 1982 when multidrug therapy (MDT) was introduced, over 11 million people have been cured of the disease, at an average cost of only £15. Most of these were treated before they developed disabilities and were spared the stigma, the deformity and disfigurement. TLM’s life-transforming vocational training programmes provide the means for former patients to gain employment, independence and acceptance in society, as do TLM’s enterprise loans - provided to cured patients to enable them to set up small businesses. Ironically, many of these businesses prosper and become so successful that others wish they’d had leprosy! Perhaps the biggest hurdle to TLM’s work is that leprosy is often presumed to be a thing of the past. Yet 631,342 new cases were detected in 2001, and it is still a public health problem in fifteen of the world’s poorest countries.