Dr MD Gupte and Dr Atul Shah to get Gandhi award for leprosy today

WARDHA: Vice-President M Venkaiah Naidu will present the International Gandhi Award for Leprosy 2017 to Dr MD Gupte and Dr Atul Shah for their outstanding contribution to the field at a programme to be held at Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences (MGIMS), Sewagram, on Sunday.
The award has been instituted by Gandhi Leprosy Foundation to recognize the services of individuals or institutions in eradication of leprosy and helping such patients to lead a normal life. The award consists of a medallion, a citation and cash prize of Rs2,00,000 to each awardee.

The recipients are selected by the award committee under the chairmanship of the Vice-President. A meeting of the committee was held at New Delhi in December last and selected Dr Gupte and Dr Shah for their selfless service. The meeting was attended by Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu, chairman of GMLF Dhirubhai Mehta, union finance minister Arun Jaitley, Health minister JP Nadda, minister of social justice Thawar Singh Gahlot, minister for information and broadcasting Smriti Irani, deputy director-general of leprosy of ministry of health Dr Anil Kumar and convener of International Gandhi Award of Leprosy Dr BS Garg.

Dr Gupte is an expert in epidemiology and public health. He started working with Gandhi Memorial Leprosy Foundation in 1976. The crowning glory in his anti-leprosy work has been the five arm international vaccine trial in south India recruiting 1,71,400 individuals to follow them up for 13 years. An important contribution by Dr Gupte was use of single dose therapy for single patch and all Pauci-Bacillary leprosy cases. He developed a simpler and programme friendly regimen, uniform multi-drug therapy through a multi-centric international trial.

Dr Shah is a Mumbai based plastic surgeon. He has served as an honorary professor of plastic surgery at Grant Medical College and Sir JJ Group of Hospitals. He has also served as district consultant and training consultant for the national leprosy eradication programme of the central government. Dr Shah has worked for close to four decades offering holistic care to the people affected, disabled and deformed by leprosy. He has shown how doctors can lend their healing hands to the poorest of the poor.