President Rupiah Banda

(Translated from the Japanese)

In July, Yohei Sasakawa, chairman of the Nippon Foundation and World Health Organization (WHO) Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination, visited Zambia in southern Africa. In a meeting with President Rupiah Banda, he obtained the President’s cooperation in the fight to eradicate leprosy and the discrimination faced by people affected by the disease. He also visited a leprosy hospital, generating extensive coverage of the problem in the Zambian media.

Although Chairman Sasakawa has visited many African nations as part of his leprosy elimination work, this was his first visit to Zambia. Sharing borders with eight other countries, Zambia has a population of approximately 12.5 million. Although in 2000 it achieved the WHO’s leprosy-control target of less than one person per 10,000, the number of people with the disease remains high in the northwestern region of the country. In Zambia, People affected by leprosy face harsh stigma and discrimination, even after they have been cured, making it difficult for to find employment or marry.

At night, temperatures in Zambia dropped below 10 degrees Celsius, and on July 1, President Banda welcomed Chairman Sasakawa to his residence wearing a sweatshirt. During their meeting, President Banda remarked that he had thought little about leprosy, confessing that he rolled up his car windows when passing the nearby Liteta Leprosy Hospital, for fear the disease might be communicable. Chairman Sasakawa assured him that there is no need for such worries, noting that he himself had come into contact with thousands of leprosy victims and recovered patients. He then told the President he wished to visit the hospital to meet its patients and to communicate to the people of Zambia, through the media, three messages: that leprosy is treatable; that discrimination is unacceptable; and that leprosy treatment is available free of charge.

Patients receiving outpatient treatment

President Banda acknowledged this and promised his support and cooperation in response, saying that he, too, would visit the hospital someday, and that he intended to consider the issue in greater depth. In a subsequent meeting, Minister of Health Kapembwa Simbao noted that the highest numbers of people with leprosy lived in the north and west of the nation and that the ministry was investigating the reason for these high numbers. He also noted that the ministry was making every possible effort to eradicate the disease and that it would seek to persuade the public that recovered patients should be permitted to return to active roles in society.

People living in a colony

Established in 1959, the Liteta Leprosy Hospital is the only leprosy hospital in Zambia’s capital city of Lusaka. A colony lies next to the hospital, home to 13 recovered patients and their 60 family members. Local newspapers and television stations reported on Sasakawa’s visit. One journalist, seeing Chairman Sasakawa speak and shake hands with leprosy victims and recovered patients, noted that he had never seen a person with leprosy in person and had only read about them in the Bible. The next morning, the front page of the Times of Zambia featured a story headlined “Stop leprosy stigma,” accompanied by a photograph of Chairman Sasakawa touching the leg of a leprosy patient.