Medicine: Lepers Take Hopo

Leprosy, the earth’s most chronic disease, is so old that mankind has learned to fear it with a neurotic fear.* The world’s 3,000,000 lepers are not alone in wanting to find a cure.

Last week a tiny ray of hope came from the National Leprosarium at Carville, La. which has been trying out Promin, one of the first sulfa drugs used against tuberculosis (the germs of the two diseases are much alike). In three years 32,000 daily injections were given to 137 leper volunteers. Result: 58% improved. In 10% of those treated over a year, leprosy bacteria disappeared; in another 30%, bacteria were reduced in number. (The tendency among untreated lepers is for bacteria to increase.)

Those who were dosed the longest and could stand the largest doses improved the most. (One trouble with Promin: treatment sometimes has to stop because it causes anemia.) Only two patients got worse in spite of treatment, and their cases were very advanced. The Leprosarium doctors think improvement under Promin is “definite.” The next step is to try out the newer, better TB drugs—diasone and streptomycin.

The immediate reaction of oldtime lepers and their doctors to any new drug is disbelief. They have seen all sorts of medicines—gold solution, diphtheria toxoid, etc.—touted and then dropped. Even chaulmoogra oil, which seemed to do some good, although it was often painful or made patients sick, has fallen into disfavor (TIME, Feb. 26, 1940). Recently the regime of a tuberculosis sanitarium—rest, good food, good care—has become the only standard treatment. By this regime alone, some 10% to 20% of leprosy cases are eventually arrested. “Cured” is a word leprologists have never dared to use.

* Recent manifestation: an effort to rename leprosy Hansen’s disease, after the Norwegian who isolated the bacillus some 70 years ago.