Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) – An appeal has been made to the international community and authorities of every nation, from the President of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers, Archbishop Zygmunt Zimowski, in his Message for the 57th World Leprosy Day, celebrated on Sunday, January 31, “and invite them to develop and strengthen the strategies that are needed in the fight against leprosy, making them more effective and capillary above all where the number of new cases is still high. All of this should be done without neglecting campaigns of education and sensitisation that are able to help the people who are afflicted and their families to move out of exclusion and obtain the treatment that is necessary.”
The text recalls that the World Leprosy Day, an initiative of Raoul Follereau, “not only a day of reflection on the victims of this devastating disease. It is first and foremost a day of solidarity with our brothers and sisters who are afflicted by it.” According to the most recent statistics published by the World Health Organisation, 210,000 new cases were registered in the year 2009. In addition, the people who are infected by this disease but are not registered as having it, or anyway are still without access to treatment, are certainly very many in number. The countries that are most afflicted are in Asia, in South America and in Africa. India has the most number of people with the disease, followed by Brazil. There are also numerous cases in Angola, Bangladesh, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Nepal and Tanzania.
“In all epochs and all civilisations the fate of people with leprosy has been that of being marginalised, deprived of any kind of social life, condemned to seeing their own bodies disintegrate until death arrives.” In light of this fact, the President of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers cites the work of Follereau, of institutions and organizations, the exceptional work of Saint Damian di Veuster and of so many other Saints and men and women of good will, in an effort to “to ensure that negative attitudes towards people with leprosy have been overcome, promoting their dignity and their rights and at the same time a more universal love for neighbour.”
In our day, there exists “effective treatment for leprosy,” and yet Hansen's Disease continues to spread for various causes, including “individual and collective acute poverty which far too often involves a lack of hygiene, the presence of debilitating illnesses, insufficient alimentation if not chronic hunger, and a lack of rapid access to medical care and treatment. At a social level there persist at the same time fears which, usually generated by ignorance, add a heavy stigma to the already terrible burden which leprosy involves, even after a person has been cured of it.”
In concluding his message, Archbishop Zimowski expresses his hearfelt thanks to “the local Churches and the various missionary and non-missionary religious institutions for what has already been done by so many of them, by consecrated men and women, lay men and women,” as well as the World Health Organization, anti-leprosy associations and non-governmental organizations, as well as numerous volunteers and all men and women of good will who through their work, marked by love for our brothers and sisters afflicted with this disease, dedicate themselves to their care in an overall way, “restoring to them the dignity, the joy and the pride of being treated as human beings.” (S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 30/1/2010)
