Leprosy currently affects approximately a quarter of a million people throughout the world, with the majority of these cases being reported from India.
[citation needed] The disease is now readily treatable with multi-drug therapy, which combines three drugs to kill the pathogen and cure the victim.
[11] The disease is thought to have spread through trade and war to other parts of Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and later Europe and the Americas.
In ancient Indian society, individuals suffering from leprosy were alienated because the disease was chronic, contagious, resulted in disfigurement, had no cure at the time, and was associated with sin.
[12] In colonial India, the government enacted the Lepers Act, 1898,[13] which institutionalised leprosy victims and separated them based on gender to prevent reproduction.
In 2005, this was incorporated into the broader healthcare system, and shortly afterwards, India announced that it had eliminated leprosy as a public health problem.
There is a lower percentage of affected individuals, but this number is still enormous in absolute terms, and India still makes up 58.8% of the world's leprosy cases.
[5] The prevalence and rate of infection have remained steady from 2005 to 2015,[2] and there are still significant delays in treatment, both from the patients and the healthcare system itself, due to a lack of knowledge about the disease.
[19] Many of these laws were written before the development of multi-drug therapy (MDT), a treatment that can make leprosy patients non-contagious and prevent further deterioration, and they have not been updated since.