Modern trends in leprosy.

Leprosy is being regarded more and more as a general medical condition. The available data about its manifestations and treatment are becoming more widely known. The problems of infectivity, animal inoculation and cultivation remain to a large extent unsolved. The recent successful inoculation of irradiated mice with fresh organisms is a major advance. It may well prove a means of testing new drugs and of confirming claims of successful cultivation, and more important still, of determining the viability of organisms obtained from both active and treated cases of leprosy. Finally, it is in the field of delayed hypersensitivity (CMI) and autoimmune processes initiated by the mycobacterial infections that this slowly progressive, greatly variable and widely disseminated infection may become a most rewarding subject for study by the immunologist of the future.