New Insights in Leprosy (Hansen's Disease) PDF Download

Author: Ciro Martins Gomes
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
ISBN: 2832545130
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 99

View

Book Description
Leprosy (or Hansen’s disease) is a chronic infectious granulomatous disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae and Mycobacterium lepromatosis that affects predominantly the skin and peripheral nerves. Leprosy is one of the oldest known illnesses of mankind; however, it is still one of the most neglected diseases worldwide, impacting more than 120 countries, mainly in underdeveloped settings. Early diagnosis and treatment are crucial for reducing the burden of this disease and avoiding long-term irreversible consequences such as deformities and mutilations. Thus, the World Health Organization has focused its efforts on preventive programs as well as the search for easy-to-handle diagnosis tools and the implementation of new strategies to improve the therapeutic options available.

Author: Pam Fessler
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631495046
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

View

Book Description
The unknown story of the only leprosy colony in the continental United States, and the thousands of Americans who were exiled—hidden away with their “shameful” disease. The Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans curls around an old sugar plantation that long housed one of America’s most painful secrets. Locals knew it as Carville, the site of the only leprosy colony in the continental United States, where generations of afflicted Americans were isolated—often against their will and until their deaths. Following the trail of an unexpected family connection, acclaimed journalist Pam Fessler has unearthed the lost world of the patients, nurses, doctors, and researchers at Carville who struggled for over a century to eradicate Hansen’s disease, the modern name for leprosy. Amid widespread public anxiety about foreign contamination and contagion, patients were deprived of basic rights—denied the right to vote, restricted from leaving Carville, and often forbidden from contact with their own parents or children. Neighbors fretted over their presence and newspapers warned of their dangerous condition, which was seen as a biblical “curse” rather than a medical diagnosis. Though shunned by their fellow Americans, patients surprisingly made Carville more a refuge than a prison. Many carved out meaningful lives, building a vibrant community and finding solace, brotherhood, and even love behind the barbed-wire fence that surrounded them. Among the memorable figures we meet in Fessler’s masterful narrative are John Early, a pioneering crusader for patients’ rights, and the unlucky Landry siblings—all five of whom eventually called Carville home—as well as a butcher from New York, a 19-year-old debutante from New Orleans, and a pharmacist from Texas who became the voice of Carville around the world. Though Jim Crow reigned in the South and racial animus prevailed elsewhere, Carville took in people of all faiths, colors, and backgrounds. Aided by their heroic caretakers, patients rallied to find a cure for Hansen’s disease and to fight the insidious stigma that surrounded it. Weaving together a wealth of archival material with original interviews as well as firsthand accounts from her own family, Fessler has created an enthralling account of a lost American history. In our new age of infectious disease, Carville’s Cure demonstrates the necessity of combating misinformation and stigma if we hope to control the spread of illness without demonizing victims and needlessly destroying lives.

Author: Domenico Bonamonte
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319485385
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 404

View

Book Description
This well-illustrated book is a comprehensive guide to the cutaneous clinical presentations of mycobacterial infections. The Mycobacterium genus includes over 170 species, nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) having been added to the obligate human pathogens such as M. tuberculosis and M. leprae. NTM are widely distributed in the environment with high isolation rates worldwide; the skin is a major target with variable clinical manifestations. A current resurgence in tuberculosis is aggravated by the synergy with human immunodeficiency virus, the breakdown of health care systems, and the rise in multidrug-resistant disease, as the incidence of leprosy remains stable, at around 250,000 new cases annually, regardless of effective antibiotic therapy. Presentations of various cutaneous infections caused by mycobacteria may be overlooked by clinicians owing the lack of familiarity with tuberculosis, leprosy, and the related NTM clinical features. This handy guide will help the dermatologist to spot the different clinical manifestations, make a prompt diagnosis, and apply effective treatment.

Author: Tony Gould
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466882972
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 591

View

Book Description
This fascinating cultural and medical history of leprosy enriches our understanding of a still-feared biblical disease. It is a condition shrouded for centuries in mystery, legend, and religious fanaticism. Societies the world over have vilified its sufferers: by the sheer accident of mycobacterial infection, they have been condemned to exile and imprisonment—illness itself considered evidence of moral taint. Over the last 200 years, the story of leprosy has witnessed dramatic reversals in terms of both scientific theory and public opinion. In A DISEASE APART, Tony Gould traces the history of this compelling period through the lives of individual men and women: intrepid doctors, researchers, and missionaries, and a vast spectrum of patients. We meet such pioneers of treatment as the Norwegian microbe hunter, Armauer Hansen. Though Hansen discovered the leprosy bacillus in l873, the 'heredity vs. contagion' debate raged on for decades. Meanwhile, across the world, Belgian Catholic missionary Father Damien became an international celebrity tending to his stricken flock at the Hawaiian settlement of Molokai. He contracted the disease himself. To the British, leprosy posed an "imperial danger" to their sprawling colonial system. In the l920s Sir Leonard Rogers of the Indian Medical Service found that the ancient Hindu treatment of chaulmoogra oil could be used in an injectable form. The Cajun bayou saw the inspiring rise of leprosy's most zealous campaigner of all: a patient. At Carville, Louisiana, a Jewish Texan pharmacist named Stanley Stein was transformed by leprosy into an eloquent editor and writer. He ultimately became a thorn in the side of the U.S. Public Heath Department and a close friend of Tallulah Bankhead. The personalities met on this journey are remarkable and their stories unfold against the backgrounds of Norway, Hawaii, the Philippines, Japan, South Africa, Canada, Nigeria, Nepal and Louisiana. Although since the l950s drugs treatments have been able to cure cases caught early—and arrest advanced cases—leprosy remains a subject mired in ignorance. In this superb and enlightened book, Tony Gould throws light into the shadows.

Author: Alfonso J. Rodriguez-Morales
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 1789848245
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 179

View

Book Description
Tropical emerging diseases pose a significant risk for the circulation of old and new pathogens in areas previously unknown, also implying the possibility of new morbidities and mortalities and new consequences for naïve populations. Globalization, migration and travel are key factors for tropical diseases, and represent the need for integration of tropical medicine, travel medicine and epidemiology in the understanding of such complex situations. Neglected tropical diseases such as leprosy or Chagas disease, arboviral diseases, HIV, Ebola, and arenaviral infections are just a few examples. This book tries to update significant epidemiological and clinical research in many aspects with a multinational perspective.

Author: Sewon Kang
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780071837811
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 2272

View

Book Description

Author: Maoshing Ni
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 0834825767
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 339

View

Book Description
The Neijing is one of the most important classics of Taoism, as well as the highest authority on traditional Chinese medicine. Its authorship is attributed to the great Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor, who reigned during the third millennium BCE. This new translation consists of the eighty-one chapters of the section of the Neijing known as the Suwen, or "Questions of Organic and Fundamental Nature." (The other section, called the Lingshu, is a technical book on acupuncture and is not included here.) Written in the form of a discourse between Huang Di and his ministers, The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Medicine contains a wealth of knowledge, including etiology, physiology, diagnosis, therapy, and prevention of disease, as well as in-depth investigation of such diverse subjects as ethics, psychology, and cosmology. All of these subjects are discussed in a holistic context that says life is not fragmented, as in the model provided by modern science, but rather that all the pieces make up an interconnected whole. By revealing the natural laws of this holistic universe, the book offers much practical advice on how to promote a long, happy, and healthy life. The original text of the Neijing presents broad concepts and is often brief with details. The translator's elucidations and interpretations, incorporated into the translation, help not only to clarify the meaning of the text but also to make it a highly readable narrative for students—as well as for everyone curious about the underlying principles of Chinese medicine.

Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Energy and Commerce. Subcommittee on Health and the Environment
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Government publications
Languages : en
Pages : 32

View

Book Description

Author: Susan L. Burns
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824879481
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

View

Book Description
In this groundbreaking work, Susan L. Burns examines the history of leprosy in Japan from medieval times until the present. At the center of Kingdom of the Sick is the rise of Japan’s system of national leprosy sanitaria, which today continue to house more than 1,500 former patients, many of whom have spent five or more decades within them. Burns argues that long before the modern Japanese government began to define a policy toward leprosy, the disease was already profoundly marked by ethical and political concerns and associated with sin, pollution, heredity, and outcast status. Beginning in the 1870s, new anxieties about race and civilization that emanated from a variety of civic actors, including journalists, doctors, patent medicine producers, and Christian missionaries transformed leprosy into a national issue. After 1900, a clamor of voices called for the quarantine of all sufferers of the disease, and in the decades that followed bureaucrats, politicians, physicians, journalists, local communities, and leprosy sufferers themselves grappled with the place of the biologically vulnerable within the body politic. At stake in this “citizenship project” were still evolving conceptions of individual rights, government responsibility for social welfare, and the delicate balance between care and control. Refusing to treat leprosy patients as simply victims of state power, Burns recovers their voices in the debates that surrounded the most controversial aspects of sanitarium policy, including the use of sterilization, segregation, and the continuation of confinement long after leprosy had become a curable disease. Richly documented with both visual and textual sources and interweaving medical, political, social, and cultural history, Kingdom of the Sick tells an important story for readers interested in Japan, the history of medicine and public health, social welfare, gender and sexuality, and human rights.

Author: King K. Holmes
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 1464805253
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 1027

View

Book Description
Infectious diseases are the leading cause of death globally, particularly among children and young adults. The spread of new pathogens and the threat of antimicrobial resistance pose particular challenges in combating these diseases. Major Infectious Diseases identifies feasible, cost-effective packages of interventions and strategies across delivery platforms to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS, other sexually transmitted infections, tuberculosis, malaria, adult febrile illness, viral hepatitis, and neglected tropical diseases. The volume emphasizes the need to effectively address emerging antimicrobial resistance, strengthen health systems, and increase access to care. The attainable goals are to reduce incidence, develop innovative approaches, and optimize existing tools in resource-constrained settings.