Investigations
SATURDAY TELEGRAPH
10 JANUARY 2015
33
Another one legged victim PHOTO: www.flickr.com
Leprosy, which attacks skin and the peripheral nerves, is vastly misunderstood
A leprosy victim with an amputated limb PHOTO: POYI.ORG
physically fit. Though, these categories of women have leper parents; that is why it is possible for us to marry within,” Abdullahi said. A company, Demion, according to Abdullahi, visits the colony every month to donate drugs and to treat them. Yet, when it is assumed that the lepers are free from leprosy, the society’s scorn makes them to recoil. There are those who still undergo treatments, even when the physicians would have assured them that the leprosy cannot resurface again. Dahiru Mohammad’s story is no different. When this reporter got to his apartment at the colony, Mohammad, who hails from Katsina State and had contracted leprosy at the age of 19, was on the bed sweating and groaning. A fetid smell oozed from his body that was racked by considerable pain. He is married and has two daughters, though, his family lives in Katsina. “He has been in that position for many years. He is an abandoned inmate. We cannot even trace his family. We talk to him only by using sign language. He is sick of pain and the struggle for existence,” said one of his neighbours at the colony Abdullahi Namadi, a widower, is in that mould too. He has been in the colony for quite a while now. His swollen leg emitted a bad smell too, but he still managed to walk without support. A dark-complexioned man in his late 40s, Namadi said: “I came to the colony almost three years ago and I have had to do it all by myself. We suffer many things here that make life not worth living anymore. As a leper, I will always need assistance to get around, but I can tell you I have had none. We live in torment everyday.” Namadi, an uncle to Abdullahi, told this reporter that his children live in Kano. He said in a day he makes between N250 and N300 through begging, but complained of the incessant harass-
ment by the state government officials. “They do not want us to come out to beg any longer. Perhaps, they want us to just sit back here and wait for death since we can’t do any other thing than begging. “The officials had arrested me on several occasions and dumped me at Majidun in Ikorodu where 1 spent about 50 days feeding on a half cup of palp with two bean cakes everyday. The same meal was served to all of us with various diseases. Apart from lepers, there were also the blind, crippled people and those with mental problems. Over 300 people died as a result of poor feeding in Majidun and their corpses thrown into the river,” Namadi said, amid tears. Lepers’ chairman at the colony, Muhammadu Sani Aliu, who doubles as father in-law to Abdullahi, was not short of pathetic story as well. He had leprosy in 1971. He is begging the Lagos State government to stop harassing them. “Instead, the government should find a way of ameliorating our sufferings in this colony. They should stop treating us like animals; rather, they should treat us like fellow humans that we are. After all, we did not beg for this condition we found ourselves. What befell us could have befallen anybody,” he pleaded. However, the environment in which they live is pitiable. There is no basic fa-
Badly disfigured legs PHOTO: POYI.ORG
cilities to support life in the settlement, prompting insinuations that they may have been assembled in that location to die. "We have no borehole here which makes us to use unhygenic water. Looking at this neigbourhood, it's difficult to believe anyone can survive here. But, God has been faithful," said Mohammad. Yet, efforts by this reporter to get both the local council and the state government to comment on the colony prove futile, as no official was ready to speak on the issue. Leprosy may seem more like a biblical-era scourge than a modern-day ailment, but today, over 4,000 new cases are detected in Nigeria, according to reports. Experts have also said that around half a million new cases are diagnosed each year worldwide. The report presented by the Leprosy Mission Nigeria (TLMN) has it that the scourge leads to a grade two disability, in which 12 per cent of children are affected and 10 per cent experience deformities as a result of unawareness. National Director of the mission, Dr. Sunday Udoh, made this known in Abuja, during a one-day sensitisation workshop on the rights of persons affected by leprosy recently. Udoh said the ailment was prevalent in all states of the federation and
victims most times face different degrees of discrimination. He noted that the disease was rampant in Zamfara, Kano, Jigawa, Benue and Kebbi states, and warned individuals against stigmatisation of leprosy patients, as they should be treated equally. Despite the recent United Nations' resolution, part of which was to stop discrimination against persons affected by leprosy, Udoh said stigmatisation remained a major concern for victims. Still, leprosy, which attacks skin and the peripheral nerves, is vastly misunderstood. Some experts believe, for instance, that it is neither contagious, nor does it inevitably lead to a loss of fingers or limbs. Although, doctors are not quite certain how anyone could get the bacterial infection; theories include exposure to armadillos, or airborne bacteria. Yet, if diagnosed early enough, a cocktail of antibiotics, according to medical experts, will wipe it out before the nerve damage that leads to disfigurement occurs. "Most doctors have only seen it once in medical school," says a doctor, who craved anonymity. "But, it is treatable and curable,” he added. For those who suffer from the ailment, that appear to be some consolation, but not much. On close examination, this reporter saw patients with bloated faces and deformed hands. They were said to be people who started treatment too late. There were also kids, whose cases were treated early and were cleared to return to classes but still had to deal with being teenage lepers. “I saw people staring at my leg,” Ibrahim, a teenage boy from Sokoto State with leprosy, who took to wearing black tights, said. He added, “A few girls, if I touched them accidentally, they would say, 'Oh my God, your leprosy!’” Yet his real friends did more than support him. They lovingly mocked him. “They’d always call him leper, says John, 16. “In religion class our teacher was dissing lepers, and I said, ‘Hold up; my best friend's a leper.’” Leprosy, according to medical research and other team of experts, is a chronic disease caused by a bacillus, Mycobacterium leprae. It multiplies very slowly with an incubation period put at five years but takes about 20 years for its symptoms to manifest. It is also said not to be highly infectious but transmitted via droplets, from the nose and mouth, during close and frequent contacts with untreated cases. For many years, it was considered a mysterious disorder associated with some type of curse, and persons with the disease were isolated and ostracised. Today, there is effective treatment and the disease can be cured. Yet, untreated CONTINUED ON PAGE 34