“Per week earlier than my mom died, her home was damaged into and burned down,” stated Mathieu Okoma Agoa, from a village in Ivory Coast.
“After her funeral, ladies danced within the village as a result of, in keeping with them, the evil was gone,” he stated.
Okoma Agoa’s mom suffered from leprosy, a illness that made her a social outcast lengthy earlier than she died. The expertise left its mark on him, too. “I’m scarred for all times,” he stated.
He’s not the one one.
Camille Kouassi Assi, the village chief, instructed how his mother and father had been additionally ostracised due to their leprosy, proper up till the top of their lives. Recalling their ordeal, his voice trembled, his eyes welling up with tears.
Each males now reside within the southern Ivorian village of Duquesne-Cremone, which because the Nineteen Sixties has been a refuge for leprosy sufferers and their family members fleeing social exclusion.
About 100km (60 miles) from the financial hub Abidjan, Duquesne-Cremone is known as after a French priest and the Italian metropolis whose inhabitants financed its creation.
‘We really feel at dwelling right here’
At first look, Duquesne-Cremone is like every other Ivorian village. However this group of two,800 inhabitants, remoted on the finish of an extended monitor that cuts via an immense forest, is sheltered from the gaze of outsiders.
And it nonetheless has 54 sufferers.
“We really feel at dwelling right here,” Kouassi Assi, a father of 4 and arithmetic trainer, instructed AFP within the small courtyard of his dwelling.
Additional alongside the identical highway, Gisele Abena, 29, was being handled on the Raoul Follereau Institute, a hospital belonging to a French group of the identical identify.
The medical centre has been preventing leprosy and Buruli ulcer, a pores and skin an infection, for almost a century.
Abena emerges from one of many pastel-coloured buildings grouped collectively on 42 hectares (103 acres). She is in a wheelchair, as leprosy has eaten away at her toes.
“I really feel good right here,” stated the mom of two. “There are loads of us and I’ve made buddies.”
Initially from Bondoukou within the northeast, she doesn’t wish to return there and expertise once more the stigma the locals imposed upon her.
Widespread ignorance
“The leprosy microbe socially excludes sufferers,” stated Professor Bamba Vagamon, director normal of the Raoul Follereau Institute in Adzopé, within the nation’s southeast.
“It distorts the face, distinctive options. The affected person not recognises himself, nor do those that know him,” he defined. “It’s as if he not actually exists. I discover this all of the extra horrible because the affected person retains all his psychological colleges.”
“Between 70 and 80 p.c of sufferers have a depressive symptom,” he added.
Ivory Coast has 12 of the 20 uncared for tropical illnesses (NTDs) listed by the World Well being Group (WHO), together with leprosy.
In 2022, 514 new circumstances had been recorded within the nation, however as a result of antibiotic-based remedies are lengthy and restoration is troublesome to find out, it’s onerous to say precisely what number of sufferers there are.
If life in Duquesne-Cremone is a welcome haven from what the sufferers have skilled elsewhere, the workers however hope that they, ultimately, return to their households – even when they’re usually reluctant to have them again due to ignorance in regards to the illness.
“Till 2015, even medical universities in Ivory Coast didn’t provide schooling on leprosy,” defined Vagamon.
Lengthy incubation
Leprosy is transmitted via extended contact. The microbe multiplies very slowly, with the incubation interval taking as much as 5 years. The primary signs trigger spots to look, then step by step eat away at desensitised limbs.
“There isn’t a check that may detect a case of leprosy earlier than the looks of bodily signs,” added Vagamon.
His institute will quickly develop into a analysis centre specialising in NTDs, with a view to creating a way of screening.
Vagamon is assured the “zero leprosy by 2030” goal set by the Ivorian well being ministry in 2022 is achievable, specifically because of elevating consciousness amongst youngsters in faculties.
Kids in rural areas characterize 10 p.c of leprosy circumstances and are commonly affected by numerous pores and skin illnesses.
“They usually come to class drained and have bother concentrating as a result of they scratch lots,” defined Pierre Bazie, deputy headmaster of the village faculty in Djougbosso.
They’re being focused by state-organised screenings financed by the Raoul Follereau Institute, so that they perceive the hazards of the illness.
