World Leprosy Day - Hari Kusta Sedunia
Hari Kusta Sedunia (World Leprosy Day) jatuh pada setiap hari Minggu, minggu terakhir bulan Januari. Tahun ini Leprosy Day jatuh pada hari Minggu tgl 28 Januari 2018. Indonesia termasuk Negara yang selalu memeringati World Leprosy Day. Saya berasumsi, banyak orang termasuk petugas kesehatan yang belum mengetahui asal muasal World Leprosy Day itu.
Selamat atas keberhasilan saudara-saudara kita petugas kesehatan yang menangani kusta dan saudara-saudara kita yang pernah mengalami atau yang sedang sakit kusta.
Zaman dahulu Leprosy Day dicanangkan untuk menggalang dana dalam penanggulangan kusta. Zaman sekarang sudah jauh berbeda dengan zaman dahulu. Kusta sudah dapat disembuhkan, obatnya tersedia secara cuma-cuma. Kusta dini ditemukan dini diobati dini akan sembuh tanpa cacat.
Sebagai referensi, di bawah ini saya copy artikel yang terkait, yang pernah saya baca selagi saya masih dokter muda.
Apa itu Leprosy Day?
Di bawah ini adalah artikel tentang situasi kusta di tahun 1950-an yang memuat juga Leprosy Day pertama kali dicetuskan oleh Roau Fallereau.
Papa Raoul: The Lepers’Apostle
By Jean-Marie Javaron
Re-typed by Yamin Hasibuan
For more than 30 years, Raoul Follereaul has waged a tireless campaign against Leprosy and the prejudices which condemned its victims to monstrous, spow death.
In a taxi en route from Orly airport to Paris on a January night in 1973, a husband and wife just back from Africa were discussing their trip. When the cab reached its destination, the driver turned and asked:
“Are you Raoul Follereau?”
“That’s right,” was the answer.
”Then this trip’s on me. I’m a cured leper, and I can’t let you pay me – not when I owe you my life.”
Hardly a week goes by without someone somewhere expressing gratitude to Raoul Follereau. For more than 30 years, this indomitable Frenchman has, campaigned against the terrible disease of leprosy and the intolerable injustices inflicted on its 15 million sufferers.
Before 1945, no country even allocated funds to fight leprosy. Today, mainly because of Follereau’s efforts, hundreds of jeeps, vans and motorbikes named after him zigzag through the African bush and Asian rice paddies carrying field workers who detect the disease and distribute the sulfone drugs that can cure or arrest it. And with his help the prejudice which for centuries made lepers outcasts has largely been conquered: we now know that leprosy is much less contagious than tuberculosis.
“That one man has been able to achieve so much,” wrote Franqois Tombalbaye, former Prsesident of Chad, ”excites our admiration and affirms our hope in the destiny of mankind.”
Leprosy probably originated in India. It was mentioned in an Indian medical treatise written 600 years before the birth of Christ. The disease reached its height in Europe between the 11th and 13th centuries and, during Philip-Augustus’ reign, it so ravaged the French population that every town was ordered to build a leprosarium. Whenever they went out, lepers had to carry and ring a small bell. They could not enter churches or even touch anything except with the tip of a staff they carried.
Since 1873, when Gerhard A. Hansen of Norway isolated the bacillus which causes leprosy, we have known it to be a microbic illness with a two-to-five-year incubation period. The disease is not hereditary, as was previously believe, though some people seem to inherit less immunity than others. Prolonged contact with leper in condition of squalor may also play a part. Dr. Louis-Paul Aujoulat, who spent 20 years treating African leper, said that “misery and filth are leprosy’s crutches.”
The poorest countries are hardest hit. Of 11 million lepers in the World Health Organization’s officially tally – most doctors feel 15 million is a more realistic figure – 6.5 million live in Asia, four million in Africa and 360,000 in Latin America. Of these 30 to 40 percent are cripples because the disease in its most advanced stage gradually eats away feet, hands and facial features. Europe has only several thousand cases of leprosy, and deformities are for the most part minimal because the symptoms are recognized in time.
Raoul Follereau first came face-to-face with lepers just before World War II, when, as reporter, he was sent to the Sahara to get a story on the French missionary, Father de Foucauld. One day his car broke down several miles from a small village in Niger.
Emerging from under the hood, he found the car surrounded by a silent group of men and women. Some had no hands, others hobbled on crutches, their feet masses of swollen flesh. Their faces were horribly disfigured. “Who are these people?” Follereau asked his guide.
“They are lepers.”
“Doesn’t anyone take care of them?”
“What for?” answered the guide. “I told you they are lepers.”
This encountered haunted Follereau from that moment on. But, unfortunately, he was to learn that such sights were far from exceptional. Outside a large city in Africa, he once found several rickety shacks in front of the city dump: the leprosarium. While travelling in India, he saw lepers crowded together in a vacant plot behind that famous tourist attraction, the Taj Mahal.
“I have seen lepers committed to insane asylums or simply left in the desert surrounded by barbed wire,” Follereau recalls. “I have visited their swarming with flies.”
It was during World War II that Follereau found his calling. Leaving Paris, as many people did at that time, he took refuge in a convent at Venissieaux, near Lyons. There, he learned that the Sisters of Notre Dame of Apostles wanted to build a leper colony at Adzope, on the Ivory Coast. The nuns’ interest and Follereau’s experience seemed a providential coincidence. Follereau took it as a sign and offered his help.
On April 15, 1943, in the Annecy Municipal Theater, he held his first lecture. For two hours, he spoke of his travels and of the horrors he had seen. A compelling public speaker, he immediately captured his audience. Two of the Sisters moved from row to row, collecting the first of many donations. During the months that followed, Follereau journeyed all over southern France: by 1945, more than 15,000 people had made modest contributions – totaling some $400,000 in all – to the Adzope leper colony.
After the war, Follereau multiplied his lectures and radio appeals and by 1951 the Adzope leper colony had begun to take shape. Grouped around a clinic in a forest clearing, the tidy houses all had vegetable gardens. A child-care center was set up for healthy children who normally would have been separated from their parents. Jen Rostand, the celebrated naturalist, said of this project, “Follereau is one of those rare poets who knows how to transform beautiful dreams into reality.”
Follereau also put his pen to work for the lepers in a quarterly newspaper called Mission de la Farnce. He soon had 20,000 dedicated readers who demonstrated their enthusiasm with letters and contributions.
Encouraged by growing support, Follereau enlarged his campaign. While visiting Saigon in 1951, he discovered that lepers were kept locked up in cemetery in one of the capital’s outlying districts. When he indignantly informed Emperor Bao Dai of the situation, the Emperor replied, “Lepers are everywhere here. Why not in a cemetery?
Although Follereau got no satisfaction from the Emperor, he set up a lepers’ assistance committee of nuns, doctors and volunteers from the capital. One year later, the lepers left the cemetery for a new colony.
Everywhere Raoul Folleau, known simply as Papa Raoul by millions of afflicted, developed warm personal relations with lepers. “We had to restore their self confidence,” he explained. Fearful of being rejected by their friends, many go into hiding when they learn they have the disease. A sad and ironic example of “lepers’ shame” occurred in Central America in 1953. A leading citizen noticed curious spots on his body. His doctor diagnosed leprosy and, several days later, the man threw himself out of window. During the post mortem, another doctor discovered the victim had only a minor skin disorder, “The man didn’t die of leprosy,” said Follereau. He died of being a leper.”
In 1956, Follereau arrived in Tahiti on the same boat as General de Guille. Almost the entire population of Papeete crowded onto the quay to welcome France’s national hero. But in one corner of the dock a small, sober group of patients from the Orofara leper colony waited to welcome Papa Raoul.
Whe he appeared on gangway, a young girl, her face scarred from the disease, stepped forward with the traditional flower garland. Afraid to put it around his neck for fear of giving offense, she waited for Follereau to take it from her hands:
“What are you waiting for?” asked the lepers’ apostle, throwing open his arms. The youngster dashed into them. The other lepers, now all smiles, rushed forward to receive kisses of greeting. The crowd on the quay burst into applause. It was a great victory.
Follereau’s fight was aided greatly by the discovery of sulfone drugs. A bit more expensive than aspirin, these tiny white tablets, perfected by a team of Institute Pasteur scientists in 1948, have been shipped to endemic-disease zones around the world and used with spectacular success. They can’t make lost hands and feet grow back, but they can arrest the disease. And in cases that are treated at an early stage they allow a “washing out” of the disease after a year or two of regular treatment.
But what good is the most effective medication if lepers are not identified? Since leprosy develops slowly, bacillus carriers may show no visible signs of the disease. Thus, a systematic detection program had to be instituted. To get the necessary funds, Follereau set up a foundation in 1953. Donation rose from $1.4 million the first year to $8.1 million by 1959.
Meanwhile, Follereau organized World Leper’s Day to get the world’s attention and to help wipe out lingering taboos and fears. In 1955, 150 radio stations announced the event in 60 different countries. All over Africa, men, women and children visited leprosaria for the first time. In Madagascar, a special train carried 2000 people, arms loaded with gifts, to the leper colony at Mangarano. Today, World Leper’s Day is a national holiday in many of the 130 countries where it is observed.
Raoul Follereau’s foundation has also grown in scope and organization. In France, 48 committees are under the organizational umbrella of the French Association of Raoul Follereau Foundation. *It, in turn, is part of the International Federation of Anti-Leprosy Organizations (I.L.E.P), which is composed of 24 national association from 17 countries. (*33, rue de Dantzing, 75015, Paris).
They provide for 580 centers and in 1975, distributed $12.1 million. The fight a young journalist began 34 years ago has truly become worldwide.
But real victory can be measured only by the number of cured victims. The struggle has been most successful in the French-speaking countries of Africa. In 1973, 2.3 million persons – 40 percent of the population – were examined in the 16 anti-leprosy sectors in the Ivory Coast. Only 3785 new cases were discovered – compared with 4280 in 1972 and 5440 in 1971. Half of the 114,629 known lepers there were about to be cured. Leprosy may disappeared from the country in ten years. The same victory seems possible in Chad.
Recently, I visited Raoul Follereau in his small apartment along the rue du General Delestraint in Paris’ XVI arrondissement. Gifts from lepers everywhere sit beside other tokens of friendship from the world’s high and mighty: a small tapestry woven by a Tuareg leper; an autographed photo of Pope Paul VI; an ivory knobkerrie from Zaire’s President Mobutu.
At 74, Follereau would have every right to sit back and view his lifetime efforts with pride. He cannot. “We’re no longer in the heroic period,” he told me, “but we mustn’t delude ourselves.” Some countries, lulled by encouraging results, dropped their anti-leprosy campaigns from to priority. Others, where campaigns were less developed than in former French colonies, have seen only a slight reduction in the incidence of the disease. And finally, the world’s population in constantly increasing, and the number of lepers with it.
During my last visit to Follereau, the telephone rang: it was Aly Cisse, Mali’s health minister, asking for an appointment during his stopover in Paris. “We’ll discuss mainly trucks, motorbikes and canoes for his country’s anti-leprosy program,” Follereau told me. “The fight must go on.”
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