Dear all:

Since someone posted about leprosy as being a reason for not doing skin-to-skin, and 
having lived in an area of the world where leprosy, goiters & cretinism, and tuberculosis 
were common --- and where a year before I arrived, ebola had broken out --- I have to 
put in my 0.02 about leprosy.  There were Belgian volunteers who worked for the Pere 
Damian society in my town and the next town over.  This organization fought leprosy and 
TB.  I have gone on many a visit to villages and fearlessly shaken the hand of many a 
person with leprosy, including the cook for the Belgian volunteers.  

Leprosy is NOT very contagious.  It is a slowly developing disease.  Tuberculosis was the 
real concern of their organization and far more contagious.  The visual image of leprosy, 
like the visual image of a starving child, is one that hits humans viscerally in ways that 
more contagious and harmful diseases sometimes do not.  The organization used the 
images of leprosy to sell their programs because of the fact that people are more afraid 
of leprosy than TB.  This is making me want to track down the doctor in the next town 
who is still (28 years later) working somewhere in the world on leprosy to give you the 
risks of transmitting leprosy to a newborn via skin to skin contact. 

The Belgian doctor really delighted in freaking other people out about gross parasites.  
One of his favorites was filaria which has worms that crawl visibly underneath the skin.  
The poor Peace Corps doctor who was supposed to treat the volunteers had very little 
training in tropical medicine and was quite freaked out about most parasites except 
malaria (he believed the Peace Corps position that there was no resistance to the 
prophylactic drug of choice which was later proven wrong).  T The Belgian doctor already 
knew the poor Peace Corps doctor was freaked out about parasites, so the Belgian doctor 
told the Peace Corps doctor how he had to check all of us for leprosy before we went 
home because 1% of us would contract it.  The Belgian doctor told him just to get a 
reaction.  Meanwhile, a huge proportion of the volunteers suffered from malaria due to 
the fact that the most deadly the strains of malaria was very resistant to the prophylaxis. 


Best, 

Susan Burger

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