Officials in Riverside County, which is near Los Angeles, said they were investigating the two suspected cases at an area elementary school. The Los Angeles Times says nursing staff at Indian Hills Elementary School in Jurupa Valley notified authorities about the possible infections on September 2, but it will take several weeks to confirm the diagnosis.
Barbara Cole, director of disease control for the Riverside County Department of Public Health said, “We have to keep stressing it’s not confirmed. We’re just at the beginning of the investigation.”
Jurupa Unified School District Superintendent Elliott Duchon said a letter was sent home to parents to inform them of the unconfirmed cases and included resources to learn more about the disease. Duchon also said that a parent of one of the two students notified the school of the preliminary diagnosis but he would not say if the two children were from the same family.
Cole, meanwhile, still has to follow-up on seeing if the children had visited another country or been in contact with someone who had leprosy. The children were not hospitalized. And while the school disinfected a few classrooms, Cole says the likelihood of getting leprosy in a classroom is low.
“Even if the cases were confirmed … leprosy is not easily transmitted to others, and we don’t feel like there’s a risk in the school setting,” she said. “It’s not a highly contagious disease.”
Hansen’s Disease in the U.S.
Leprosy, also known as Hansen’s Disease is a long-term infection caused by the bacilli Mycobacterium leprae and Mycobacterium lepromatosis. It is usually spread by close contact through either a cough or contact with fluid from the nose of an infected person. But it is not highly contagious, contrary to popular belief.
And while leprosy cases in the United States are rare, there are between 100 and 200 cases of the disease reported every year in this country, according to the CDC. Fully 95 percent of leprosy cases worldwide can be found in 14 countries, with India having the greatest number, followed by Brazil and Indonesia.
In 2014, there were 145 cases of leprosy reported in the U.S. with nearly three-quarters of them reported in seven states: Arkansas, California, Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana, New York and Texas. In February 2015, three cases of leprosy were reported in Florida, with all of them caused by coming into contact with armadillos who are carriers of the disease. By July 2015, the number of cases had jumped to nine.
But despite knowing where Floridians are picking up the bacteria, it still doesn’t lessen the stigma associated with this disease. And to say there is a jump in the number of cases is also erroneous because leprosy has an incubation period that can be as long as four years or more.
The good news is that leprosy is treatable and there are antibiotic regimens that are very successful. The treatment involves using Multidrug therapy (MDT) that is highly effective, with people not being contagious after the first month of therapy.
