Word: kalaupapa
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Your long and accurate report of the leprosy situation on Kalaupapa [Sept. 19] is most welcome. Hawaii has demonstrated that given the will and the resources, leprosy patients can be treated and the disease controlled...
...where or when Damien contracted leprosy, which caused his death in 1889, can never be known. The disease can have an incubation period of ten or more years and the priest might have been previously exposed to contagious patients. Other than Damien, no one serving leprosy patients at Kalaupapa has ever developed a confirmed case of the disease. Neither has anyone at the other principal US leprosarium at Carville...
Although physical and medical conditions at Kalaupapa improved steadily as the patient population reached its peak of 1,180 in 1890, most patients remained contagious and suffered the progressively crippling and deforming effects of the disease. Many appeared to lose their noses because the bone is absorbed into adjacent tissues. The same thing happened to the finger bones; the fingers do not become gangrenous and drop off, as many scare stories have it, but the bones are gradually broken down and absorbed until the hand is left with only short stumps where fingers and thumb should be. Foot drop-paralysis...
Sister Wilmer reached Kalaupapa at a propitious moment. The first medications more effective than the Asian ancients' chaulmoogra oil had been developed by U.S. researchers, tested at the Public Health Service Hospital in Carville, and just released for use in Hawaii. The best-known and most widely used is dapsone (DDS). For those who also had tuberculosis, isoniazid was used. Still newer drugs include the potent antibiotic rifampin, and even thalidomide, which is administered to treat complications, but not for women of childbearing age. Collectively, these are indeed wonder drugs: when used promptly to treat newly discovered cases, says...
...release noncontagious patients from quarantine and isolation, politicians and the public were slow to recognize this. It was not until 1969 that the government of the fledgling state of Hawaii took the final bold step of abolishing isolation-in effect, flinging the prison doors wide open. The patients at Kalaupapa and at Hale Mohalu, a hospital and treatment center in Pearl City on Oahu, were free to leave or to come and go as they pleased...