Santacroce Luigi, Del Prete Raffaele, Charitos Ioannis Alexandros, Bottalico Lucrezia
Department of Interdisciplinary Medicine, Section of Microbiology, Policlinico University Hospital of Bari, Italy.
CEDICLO - Interdepartmental Research Center for Pre-Latin, Latin and Oriental Rights and Culture Studies, University of Bari, Italy.
Infez Med. 2021 Dec 10;29(4):623-632. doi: 10.53854/liim-2904-18. eCollection 2021.
This article aims to investigate about the social stigma and the prejudice of society towards the patients with leprosy, but also to understand how this infectious disease has largely influenced human lifestyle and evolution analyzing the evolution of its treatments from past empirical treatments to actual multidrug therapy (MDT). References on leprosy were extensively searched in literature using PubMed, Web of Science, Medline, Springer link and Elsevier's (EMBASE.com) databases, but also in medical, religious and archaeological books. Leprosy's spread all around the world following human paths of migration from the African Continent to the Asian one and to Europe, instead its appearance in the New Continent is more recent. Wars, unhygienic conditions, social and health inequality created conditions for its spread since prehistorical times, and existing health disparities contributed to unequal morbidity and mortality, before its gradual decline after the Middle Ages due to the raise of other worse pandemics. Starting from Renaissance, a deeper knowledge on its pathophysiological mechanisms brought an increasingly advanced combined surgical and pharmacological treatment, but still in modern times many efforts have been made to erase its social stigma, changing its name in "Hansen's disease" included.
本文旨在调查社会对麻风病患者的耻辱感和偏见，同时通过分析麻风病治疗方法从过去的经验性治疗到实际的多药联合治疗（MDT）的演变，来了解这种传染病如何在很大程度上影响了人类的生活方式和进化。我们在PubMed、科学网、医学在线、施普林格链接和爱思唯尔（EMBASE.com）数据库中广泛搜索了有关麻风病的文献，同时也在医学、宗教和考古书籍中进行了查找。随着人类从非洲大陆迁移到亚洲再到欧洲，麻风病在世界各地传播开来，而它在新大陆出现的时间则较晚。战争、不卫生的条件、社会和健康不平等自史前时代起就为其传播创造了条件，在中世纪后由于其他更严重的大流行病的出现，麻风病逐渐减少之前，现有的健康差距导致了发病率和死亡率的不平等。从文艺复兴开始，对其病理生理机制的更深入了解带来了越来越先进的手术和药物联合治疗，但即使在现代，人们也做出了许多努力来消除其社会耻辱感，包括将其名称改为“汉森病”。
