China leprosy victims walk again with prosthetic limbs

CHINA: Thanks to Fan Guoshun, thousands of leprosy sufferers can walk again.

Fan, whose lack of facial hair and eyelashes are telltale signs of his own fight with leprosy, travels around China’s southern Guangdong province making prosthetic limbs and customised shoes for people left disabled by the disease.

“When we fit the limbs on them, they are able to stand up for the first time in years and they are so happy,” said 29-year-old Fan, now recovered from the disease.

Fan works for Handa, a Chinese charity that helps sufferers of leprosy, or Hansen’s disease.

“Some have lost all their toes or entire feet, so we custom-make shoes for them. Some are able to do light housework or go back to the farm afterwards,” Fan told Reuters.

In the past, leprosy sufferers were ostracised by their communities as the disease was incurable, disfiguring and wrongly thought to be highly infectious.

However, modern medicine made it curable from the 1940s, and victims can now be treated effectively with a multidrug therapy for between six months to a year. If diagnosed and treated early, the disease leaves no traces.

But in some places such as China, stigma still surrounds the disease and victims don’t seek treatment until it is too late.

Caused by the Mycobacterium leprae, leprosy affects the skin, mucous membranes, peripheral nerves and eyes. As nerve damage is permanent, even those who have recovered can’t feel pain. Minor cuts and abrasions on fingers and toes often turn into gaping, inflamed ulcers because of unsanitary living conditions.

These open sores overrun the digits, which slowly shrink and many sufferers end up with stumps. Some have legs amputated.

Contrary to popular belief, leprosy ranks lowly in terms of infectiousness and is not congenital. It is passed via respiratory droplets among people in close and prolonged contact. Ninety-five percent of people are naturally immune to it.

Stigma and ignorance

Fan’s grandfather and parents had leprosy and suspected he had the disease when he was 16. He eventually received treatment with an antibiotic cocktail before the disease had caused irreversible damage.

“After I recovered, I heard that Handa was conducting training classes to make prosthetic limbs. That was how I started this career. I am very lucky,” Fan said happily.

Leprosy is officially eliminated in China, meaning prevalence is lower than 1 in 100,000. There are 3,510 active cases today.

But over 200,000 victims who have recovered, and their healthy descendents, still live in villages with little or no hope of rejoining society because of the disease’s stigma.

“Those in Guangdong are a lot more isolated because they were forbidden from getting married. Up to the 1980s, they would have to be sterilised if they wanted to get married. This was due to misunderstanding that their children would be sick too,” said Michael Chen, project coordinator of Handa.

Handa believes one way to reduce stigma is to stop using words like “leper”, a term loaded with age-old misconceptions.

Fan and his colleagues a team of four people have custom-made over 9,000 pairs of shoes and 359 prosthetic limbs since 2000 for people disabled by the disease.

“We not only make shoes and prosthetic limbs, but we help them change their lives and let them walk again,” Fan’s supervisor Yuan Yahua explained.