Stigma numbs Tanzania's attempts at battling leprosy

Paulina Nungu believes witchcraft was behind the leprosy which ate away her index finger and some of her toes.

She contracted the disease while still a young woman. Now old and wizened, she cares less about a festering wound where her toes once were than who she thinks is to blame.

"My father had three wives. He was rich with many cattle. He took me to (traditional) doctors, but they could do nothing," she whispers conspiratorially, her watery eyes peering intently from behind the dirty cloth covering her face.

One of her stepmothers cursed her with leprosy, she said.

Nungu is one of the 32 residents of the Nunge Rehabilitation Centre; a camp built in 1936 for lepers, that has since opened up to house orphans, the elderly and disabled.

She is one of an estimated 20,000 lepers in Tanzania who have been cured of the nerve disease but still live with its debilitating physical, social and mental afflictions.

Estimates by the health ministry show that there are 5,000 new infections every year, but that is a major cut in the 36,000 new cases annually recorded in the early 1980s.

Like Nungu, many villagers in Tanzania still link the disease to the work of witchdoctors or a divine curse, and turn to traditional healers for a remedy.

Such beliefs are a challenge for doctors working in the bounds of science to fight a curable disease.

"There are still many who claim they can do it and hold onto patients for six years, getting money from them," said Dr. S.M. Egwaga of the National Tuberculosis and Leprosy Programme.

"When they fail to cure a patient, they tell them that 'it is a curse of god and there is nothing you can do, you wait until your last day.'"

DISCRIMINATION

Mohammed Ali scoops his four-year-old son under his armpits and lifts him onto his lap, using the inch-long stumps left of his fingers to grasp him.

His blood-shot eyes keep tearing as a result of an operation to keep him from going blind.

As the disease progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult for patients to blink or close their eyes when asleep, drying the cornea and leading to blindness.

When Ali became sick he was still a boy. His mother left him and his father because she believed Ali was a cursed child. Teachers would not let him into their classrooms and neighbours forbade him from playing with their children.

His father died when he was barely a teenager, leaving him to fend for himself. Though he is cured of the disease, he remains crippled and disfigured.

But he found a wife, an epileptic daughter of two leprosy victims who once lived at Nunge camp.

"I can't ask for anything else other than enough food and good health for my family," he said, proudly parading his wife and three of his four children.