Abstract
The World Health Organization’s leprosy-elimination campaign has significantly reduced global leprosy prevalence, but approximately 214,000 new cases of leprosy are reported each year. An ancient and neglected affliction, leprosy is also one of the most heavily stigmatised diseases of all time. We developed a mathematical model to examine the effects of stigma on sustaining disease transmission, using low and high degrees of stigma, as well as in its absence. Our results show that stigma does indeed play a central role in the long-term sustainability of leprosy. We also examined sensitivity of the outcome to all parameters and showed that the effects of stigma could increase the number of infected individuals by a factor of 80. Therefore both targeted education and shifts in cultural attitudes towards leprosy will be necessary for the eventual eradication of the disease.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Alison Kealey and Nyuk Sian Chong for invaluable assistance and are also grateful to an anonymous reviewer for insightful comments that greatly improved the manuscript. RS? is supported by an NSERC Discovery Grant. For citation purposes, please note that the question mark in “Smith?” is part of the author’s name.
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Mosher, S.G., Costris-Vas, C., Smith, R. (2020). Modelling the Effects of Stigma on Leprosy. In: Roy, P., Cao, X., Li, XZ., Das, P., Deo, S. (eds) Mathematical Analysis and Applications in Modeling. ICMAAM 2018. Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics, vol 302. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0422-8_5
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