Abstract
ACCORDING to the Journal of the American Medical Association of April 4 the prevalence of leprosy in Brazil is comparable to that of the U. S. S. R., which has about 170,000 lepers to 170 millions of population. There are now sixteen modern leprosariums, where 15,173 patients were isolated on December 31, 1941. In the State of São Paulo more than 90 percent of the contagious cases are isolated in six leprosariums, about 2,500 cases are isolated in the State of Minas Gerais and about 1,000 in the State of Para. There are 15 preventoriums where the healthy children of lepers are interned and many more institutions of the kind are being organized. Since 1938 the technique of infiltrations of the lesions through multiple local injections of chaulmoogra oil has been increasingly used with good results. The epidemiology of leprosy in Brazil is now being investigated. About 25 percent of the cases are of the purely nervous form. The disease is more prevalent in males than in females and in coloured natives than in white Brazilians. The prevalence is also higher in white foreign people and in white foreign-born Brazilians than in white native-born Brazilians.
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Leprosy in Brazil. Nature 149, 636 (1942). https://doi.org/10.1038/149636c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/149636c0