Unclean... unclean...
Occured to me on the way in to the office this morning that at least some of the random disfigurement I see on the streets of India isn't simply the result of the casual brutality that's just part of life in the third world. It's not merely attributable to a higher incidence of accidental maiming in a highly accident-prone society.

Nope. It's leprosy.

We took a slightly different route this morning, and passed a leprosy clinic as we came to work, and the penny finally dropped. Leprosy... how very 21st century.

Which means that when Stumpy and his feculent cousins come knocking at the car window at stoplights looking for a handout (err... stump-out), there's as good a chance as any that they're not just run-of-the-mill filthy beggars -- they're actually run-of-the-mill filthy leper beggars.

Turns out that India has the world's largest population of lepers worldwide -- in 2002, about 473,000 of Asia's total number of 520,000 leprosy cases were found here. Last year another half a million people were apparently infected with leprosy.

Okay, a lot of it is simple mathematics; if you start with more than a billion people, working on a simple percentage basis, the numbers get very big very fast. But still... in India, the equivalent of entire city of Denver was infected with leprosy between 2002 and 2003. Holy shit.

Not sure what to do with this new-found piece of information. Requires a lot more mulling over.
- posted by slaughts @ 1:41 PM