Call to ensure training, job for lepers
Due to superstitions and lack of government initiatives, most lepers remain segregated from job opportunity, said lepers' leaders, urging the government to provide them with loan and technical training for their rehabilitation.
They put forward the demand at a press briefing organised by The Leprosy Mission International (TLMI), an organisation working for lepers, at YWCA Auditorium in the city's Mohammadpur yesterday.
A misleading concept regarding leprosy still prevails in the society, so lepers cannot have spontaneous association in the society, making them alienated and consequently jobless, they said.
Their others demands included arranging treatment of leprosy at all public and private hospitals, ensuring equal rights for lepers in jobs, removing discriminations in academic institutions towards the children of lepers and incorporating lessons on leprosy in textbooks.
Though some government and non-government hospitals give them treatment and medicine free-of-cost, but no government organisation came forward with monitory assistance or training to bring back the lepers to normal life, they added.
Contacted over phone, Dr Safir Uddin Ahmed, deputy program manager of National Leprosy Elimination Program, said, “The government and eight other NGOs are providing medicare to lepers. As we work under Health Ministry, we have no arrangement for rehabilitating them.”
He added that, at current, more than 20,000 lepers became disabled due to the disease.
Dr Safir said, in 1991, in every 10,000 people, 13.6 were affected with leprosy where as, in 2011, the total number of fresh cases of leprosy was only 3,800 out of the total population. This shows that leprosy has declined over the time in Bangladesh.
Project Manager Jewel Baidya of TLMI, Manger Mallica R Halder of DCBRP and Dr Aprue Mong of LEPRA, among others, attended the briefing.
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