Mumbai: A special drive conducted by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to detect leprosy cases, found 12 children among 88 cases in the last fifteen days in the city.
According to the BMC, this is the highest number of detections in the last five years. Dr VV Pai, Director, Bombay Leprosy Project, said it is important to analyse all the leprosy cases in children.
“As per the World Health Organisation (WHO) direction, we need to aim at detecting children with zero disability. Cases among children indicate active transmission,” he said.
Pai added that after the special drive is over, they will be analysing every case to understand how many of them are locals, how many have progressive disease and which form of leprosy.
Leprosy is a chronic infectious disease which mainly affects the skin, the peripheral nerves, the mucosa of the upper respiratory tract, and the eyes.
While it is curable with multidrug therapy, however, if untreated, the disease can lead to progressive and permanent damage to the skin, nerves, limbs and eyes. According to the WHO, the Covid-19 pandemic led to a reduction in new case detection by 37 per cent in 2020 compared with 2019.
According to the BMC data, at present eleven city wards are contributing to 57 per cent (160 of 282 cases) of the confirmed leprosy cases in the city. These wards include E (Byculla), F/N (Matunga East), F/S (Parel, Lalbaug), G/N (Dadar West), G/S (Prabhadevi), H/E (Santacruz East), H/W (Bandra West), K/E (Andheri East) and K/W ward (Andheri West).
The BMC health officials said the proportion of advanced multibacillary leprosy has increased in the new detections which can be attributed to the backlog of missed detections of the past two years due to the pandemic.
“Around 8 per cent of the 88 cases had grade 2 leprosy – visible deformities. We aim to find cases at an early stage so that they do not transmit it to others,” said Dr Manish Renghe, BMC Assistant Director (Leprosy).
Dr Pai too said the special drive has helped detect the cases that went hidden in the Covid-19 pandemic.
“During the Covid-19 pandemic, the healthcare services were diverted toward Covid-19 management. The new case detection was suspended. The referral services, and treatment services were also affected. This has led to a huge backlog which is now getting detected with the special drive,” said Dr Pai.
He said grade-2 leprosy happens if a patient has not taken treatment for more than two years.
BMC said there are close to 10402 suspected leprosy cases detected in the special drive.