Noordeen S K
Leprosy Unit, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland.
Bull World Health Organ. 1995;73(1):1-6.
Leprosy is still an important problem in about 80 countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, some 2.4 million persons being estimated to have the disease in 1994. The WHO-recommended standard multidrug therapy (MDT) was introduced in the 1980s and has been shown to be effective in combating the disease. Experiences based on many thousands of patients treated with MDT over the past decade indicate extremely low relapse rates (cumulative relapse rates around 1%). By the end of 1993, some 5.6 million patients had been cured, and the global cumulative MDT coverage of registered patients had reached 89%. The number of registered cases fell from 5.4 million in 1985 to 1.7 million in 1994. The significant progress made in leprosy control enabled the World Health Assembly in 1991 to set a goal for eliminating leprosy as a public health problem by the year 2000. One important epidemiological factor is that leprosy is very unevenly distributed: 80% of the problem is confined to only five countries and 92% to just 25 countries. The elimination strategy envisages identifying and treating with MDT a total of about 5 million cases from 1994 to the year 2000. The cost of dealing with these cases has been estimated at US$ 420 million, including US$ 150 million for the drugs.
在亚洲、非洲和拉丁美洲的约80个国家，麻风病仍然是一个重要问题。据估计，1994年约有240万人患有这种疾病。世界卫生组织推荐的标准多药疗法（MDT）于20世纪80年代开始采用，已被证明在对抗该疾病方面有效。过去十年中基于数千名接受MDT治疗的患者的经验表明复发率极低（累积复发率约为1%）。到1993年底，约560万患者已被治愈，全球登记患者的MDT累计覆盖率达到89%。登记病例数从1985年的540万降至1994年的170万。麻风病控制方面取得的重大进展使世界卫生大会在1991年设定了到2000年消除麻风病作为公共卫生问题的目标。一个重要的流行病学因素是麻风病分布极不均衡：80%的问题仅局限于五个国家，92%局限于25个国家。消除战略设想在1994年至2000年期间总共识别并使用MDT治疗约500万病例。处理这些病例的费用估计为4.2亿美元，其中包括1.5亿美元的药品费用。
