"I pray that God will help us move quickly back to the mainland," says Huang, 84. "I want to see my family again."
Banished decades ago to the Dajin Island leper colony in the South China Sea, Huang and her fellow leprosy victims, all cured but disfigured, have buried hundreds of friends over the years. The last 45 survivors wait for God, and the Chinese government, to speed their return to a country that has changed beyond all recognition but retains fear and prejudice about leprosy.
China has promised to transfer the 20,000 residents of its more than 600 remaining leper villages — mostly in poor, remote areas — to 100 renovated or new facilities that have better medical care and living standards.
The project, announced three years ago, is stalled in many counties as local governments argue over who should pay, says Yang Zhongmin, a leprosy doctor and former head of the non-profit China Leprosy Association.
Yang worries about the estimated 200,000 former carriers of leprosy who live beyond the leper villages, often in desperate conditions.
"Their families don't want them, and society doesn't want them," he says. "They suffer prejudice in everything they do."
Since the Communist Party took power in 1949, when there were more than half a million leprosy cases, China has achieved effective control but not full eradication of the disease, says Pan Chunzhi, the association's secretary-general.
The 1,600 cases discovered in 2009 were concentrated in China's poorest areas, mostly in the southwest, she says. Late detection meant that 87.5% of those new infections were highly contagious, more than double the world average, and nearly a quarter of newly diagnosed cases in 2010 suffered severe disability, almost six times the global level.
Leprosy, which has afflicted humanity for 4,000 years, is caused by bacteria that damage the skin, nerves, limbs and eyes. It can be treated successfully with drugs that became widely available in the early 1980s.
Read more at USA Today
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