User:WHO Leprosy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The WHO Leprosy team is part of the Neglected Tropical Diseases group situated in the Communicable Diseases Cluster of the World Health Organization, an agency of the United Nations based in Geneva, Switzerland.
The standard treatment for leprosy, multidrug therapy (MDT) was first recommended by a WHO Expert Committee in 1981. However, over the next decade the absence of a major donor for the new combined therapy meant that its adoption by most endemic countries remained slow and sporadic. A new impetus was provided in 1991 when member states of WHO adopted a resolution at the World Health Assembly, calling upon WHO to help eliminate leprosy as a public health problem at the global level (defined as one patient per 10,000 population).
Since then, and as part of this ongoing mandate, WHO has worked closely with the international donor community, pharmaceutical companies and non-government organizations to channel funds towards the elimination of the disease. By 1995 it had become the major global supplier of MDT drugs, which it supplied free of charge to patients in all endemic countries. Today, with the wide implementation of MDT, the disease burden has been massively reduced, and the number of countries still to reach elimination at the national level has now fallen to just five.
WHO continues to supply MDT free of cost to all countries on official request and plays a leading role in mobilizing partners and resources to ensure that treatment is made available to all patients. Since the disease has a very long incubation period, this strategy must be kept up for some years to come, in order to maintain a "multidrug pressure" on the reservoir of bacilli in affected communities.
Progress being achieved towards the elimination of the disease remains impressive, even in countries previously considered highly endemic in the recent past. Many countries are now advocating the same elimination strategy be applied at sub-national levels. For the first time in human history it has became possible to envisage a world without leprosy.
