Noida sees 40% rise in leprosy cases in one year

The health department in Gautam Budh Nagar found 24 new confirmed cases of leprosy in the district during its 14-day detection drive that ended on Thursday. With this, the total number of cases detected in the current financial year has gone up to 118, witnessing an alarming 40% rise over the previous year.

Besides 24 new cases, 31 cases were determined during a similar drive conducted in July and the rest were reported from hospitals and nursing homes in the district, officials said.

The absolute number of leprosy cases has been seeing a consistent increase, though the prevalence rate has not increased much. The officials said that this is because the base population covered every year is also increasing. The district had reported 84 leprosy cases in 2017-18 and 78 in 2016-17. The increasing number of cases is a cause of concern for doctors who said that such hidden cases were expected to be fewer in the district.

The officials said that the sharp rise in leprosy cases is because such an intensive drive has never taken place to find hidden cases. Gautam Budh Nagar is one of the 32 districts of Uttar Pradesh where Leprosy Case Detection Campaign (LCDC) was undertaken this financial year. It is done in districts with prevalence or where the disability rate is over 1%. The prevalence rate in Gauta Budh Nagar has been around 0.5% while the disability rate is about 2%.

“Since July last year, we have undertaken two campaigns to check for any skin patches that may seem dangerous. We do an intensive screening by going door-to-door. We screened about 24 lakh people in July and over 30 lakh in the past few days. This is how the hidden cases are now coming to light,” Dr Anurag Bhargava, chief medical officer, said.

He added that most of these people did not consider seeing a doctor as they thought of it as a minor skin disease or allergy. Since people kept avoiding seeing a doctor, over 60% of the new cases are multibacillary leprosy (MB).

There are two types of leprosy — paucibacillary leprosy (PB) wherein five or less skin patches have lost sensitivity and one nerve is affected and multibacillary leprosy wherein more than five skin patches have lost sensitivity and two or more nerves are affected.

First Published: Mar 01, 2019 05:33 IST