Dharamsala: Everyone’s participation is necessary for the eradication of leprosy, everyone should co-operate to eradicate the discrimination of leprosy from the society Chief Medical Officer Dr Gurdarshan Gupta said this as chief guest on Monday during a day-long training for Medical Officer, Community Health Officer, Supervisor, Health worker and ASHA worker under National Leprosy Eradication Program.
He said the trainers that there are still a lot of leprosy cases coming up in India, Brazil and Indonesia.
During the training program, Dr Anuj Sharma from Dr Rajendra Prasad Government Medical College, Tanda while imparting detailed training, said that leprosy, like other infectious diseases, spreads through coughing and sneezing of the patient, when the germ of leprosy enters a healthy person. Between 5 and 10 years, the symptoms start appearing in that person, in the symptoms, sensations start appearing in the person’s body, the nerves of the person’s body start getting destroyed and in the later stage limb deformity also occurs.
District Program Officer Dr Rajesh Sood said that the objective of this training is to eradicate discrimination related to leprosy which is also known as Hansen’s disease, to quickly identify the patient suffering from leprosy and put him on treatment and to prevent organ deformity and zero leprosies in children.
He said that by bringing new changes in the program for eradication of leprosy, an active case search has to be done to prevent organ deformity in them. Dr Sood said that the Government of India has set a target of bringing leprosy to zero diseases, zero organ deformity and the stigma and discrimination associated with this disease to zero by 2030.
He further said that the main task of the trainers is to provide medicines to prevent leprosy to the family members coming in contact with the patient and to do a detailed analysis on the deformity of the patient. He called upon everyone to participate enthusiastically in this campaign, just as the eradication of polio was taken as a mass campaign.
