{"id":100217,"date":"2024-11-11T07:19:05","date_gmt":"2024-11-11T07:19:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/ancient-disease-is-a-thing-of-the-past-in-jordan\/"},"modified":"2024-11-11T07:19:07","modified_gmt":"2024-11-11T07:19:07","slug":"ancient-disease-is-a-thing-of-the-past-in-jordan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/ancient-disease-is-a-thing-of-the-past-in-jordan\/","title":{"rendered":"Ancient disease is a thing of the past in Jordan"},"content":{"rendered":"


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When you read the word “leprosy,” you may think of the Middle Ages. It was a feared disease in large parts of Europe in the first half of the 11th century. At the time, there was no treatment, so if you were first affected by the bacteria that leads to the disease, you were often doomed to suffer crippling injuries to the body. But it doesn’t have to be that way today. – It is a feared and stigmatizing disease, which has always had a terrible reputation. It doesn’t really need to have that anymore. Firstly, it can be treated and completely cured, and secondly, it is not as contagious as previously thought. That’s what Ib Christian Bygbjerg says. He is professor emeritus at the department of global health at the University of Copenhagen, and he has been a senior physician and treated leprosy in both India and the Congo. Although leprosy has long been a thing of the past here in Europe, the disease is still found in 120 countries in the world. In 2023, there were almost 183,000 new cases worldwide. But not in the Arab country of Jordan. Jordan is the first country in the world to receive certification from the World Health Organization (WHO) for having eradicated leprosy. Body parts disappear Leprosy is a skin disease and an infection of the nervous tissue, which comes from the bacterium with the Latin name Mycobacterium leprae. If left untreated, it can lead to terrible deformities of the body. – If you don’t catch it early, it spreads. Even if you have a good immune system, the bacteria can live both in the skin, mucous membranes and around the nerves. When our immune system starts to kill the bacteria, it can cause swelling in the nerves, and then it destroys the nerve. Then suddenly you can’t use one hand, you limp, can’t close your eyes, or your face gets crooked, says Ib Christian Bygbjerg. In the worst case, the disease can lead to body parts being “absorbed” back into the body. It can be fingers, toes or even the nose that disappears. But if you are aware, the disease can be caught before long-term damage occurs. And one can even be completely treated for it. – It often starts with a small spot on the skin, which one suspects may be leprosy, if it is numb, says Ib Christian Bygbjerg. No new cases in 20 years Although leprosy has been eradicated in many countries since it ravaged many years ago, Jordan is the first country in recent times to officially eradicate the disease. There have been no new cases of leprosy in Jordan for over 20 years. – Jordan’s eradication of this ancient disease is a historic milestone in public health and a huge success in the fight against leprosy globally, says WHO’s regional director for South-East Asia, Saima Wazed, who leads the WHO’s global program against leprosy, in a press release. And according to Ib Christian Bygbjerg, you don’t get a WHO certification just like that. – It requires reporting properly and honestly, following up on the cases, and so on. So it is a recognition of their monitoring system and honesty, he says. Among other things, Jordan has ensured that all cases are recorded in detail, and doctors, especially GPs and dermatologists, have been given courses to refresh their knowledge of leprosy and how to catch it. And the disease is easy to cure once it is detected. – There has been modern treatment since 1982, most can be cured in six months, and the rest within 12, says Ib Christian Bygbjerg. Since 1995, the WHO has ensured that the treatment \u2013 \u200b\u200ba mixture of the drugs dapsone and rifampicin \u2013 is free. And great progress has been made against the disease worldwide. In the 1980s, more than five million were infected globally, and 40 years later, cases of leprosy have fallen by 97 percent. Fight against taboo The fact that leprosy has still not been eradicated, despite the fact that there is treatment that works, is because the disease is still associated with a great taboo. In many places in the world, people are afraid to speak out loud about it, for fear of being ostracized. That’s a problem, because even though the disease can be cured, the damage to the body is permanent. – The fight against leprosy around the world is more than a fight against a disease. It is also a fight against stigmatization and a fight against psychological and socio-economic damage, says WHO’s Saima Wazed in a press release. And Ib Christian Bygbjerg agrees. – All cases should be able to be caught when you have already had the first spot – but because it is stigmatizing, and because there is still not enough information that it is a curable disease, there are still some who do not want to say out loud that they have the spots , he says and adds: – So what is needed to move forward is openness and information. That is what has been mastered in Jordan.
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When you read the word “leprosy,” you may think of the Middle Ages. It was a feared disease in large parts of Europe in the first half of the 11th century. At the time, there was no treatment, so if you were first affected by the bacteria that leads to the disease, you were often […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":100218,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[12019,2727,7890],"class_list":["post-100217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-ancient","tag-disease","tag-jordan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100217\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}