Between January 2019 and October 2025, the Upper East Region of Ghana quietly recorded 188 cases of leprosy, a disease as old as civilization, yet as misunderstood and feared as ever. Apexnewsgh reports
These numbers, dry on paper, conceal stories of courage and struggle, of families fractured and communities forever changed. At the center of this unfolding story is Eric Dakura, the Disease Control Officer at the Upper East Health Directorate, whose daily work illuminates the dark corners where leprosy still hides.
Eric’s insight and passion were brought to light in the documentary “Pains of the Forgotten: Leprosy, Stigma, and Resilience,” produced by Ngamegbulam Chidozie Stephen of ApexNewsGH. With a clinical calm that betrays deep empathy, Eric decoded the disease for viewers: “Leprosy is a disease of the skin and the nerves. If you don’t get the treatment early, it will affect your nerves and finally lead to the wasting of your feet or your fingers, and that can lead to disability.”
Unlike most diseases, leprosy’s touch is silent. Its symptoms can take years—sometimes three, five, even twenty- to appear after infection. “It’s not like any other disease that when you get infected within a week or two weeks, you get the signs and symptoms,” Eric explains. “It can be in you for over three years, up to twenty or even more years until it begins to manifest.” The first warning is often a pale, painless patch on the skin. Because these patches neither itch nor hurt, they are easily dismissed—until the disease has already begun its devastating work.
“Leprosy doesn’t cause pain,” Eric says. “That is why you can see somebody with their fingers being chopped off, but there is no pain… if you even put them into fire, they will never feel anything because the nerves are all destroyed.”
The destruction of nerve endings is what makes leprosy so dangerous and so easy to miss. Eric recalls a haunting case from his rounds: “A girl found a three-inch nail in her foot last year. She didn’t even know it was there because all the nerves were affected.” By the time many are diagnosed, the disease has already stolen their ability to feel, to move, or even to recognize when they are hurt.
Early detection remains the greatest challenge. “We always get to know leprosy at a later stage, when the hands and the feet are gone. We don’t want to be recording cases at that stage because it means that our surveillance system is not the best.” The region now grades leprosy cases by disability: some show no deformities, some suffer numbness, while others arrive with missing fingers, feet, or affected eyes.
Leprosy is endemic in all districts, but certain areas—like Bongo—have become persistent hotspots. There is progress, though: the annual number of new cases has dropped, from 32 in 2020 to just 16 currently on treatment. Yet Eric cautions that declining numbers are not always comforting. “If we record a lot of cases, it’s also good—meaning we are fishing out the hidden cases and treating them. But if we feel the numbers are declining, that could also be dangerous. We must always be on the watch.”
Leprosy respects no boundaries. It is not hereditary, nor confined to the poor or the old. “Seventy percent of cases are male, but the youngest can be just two years old,” Eric shares. “There is no age that is exempted. Everybody, males, females, we are all at risk of getting it.”
Yet there is hope, because leprosy is curable. “Leprosy is curable. That has always been the slogan. Just come, we’ll treat you and you’ll be fine,” Eric says, his tone unwavering. The medication, though costly for the government, is provided free of charge. “Wherever you are, the medicine can come to you, even your home.”
But for all the medical progress, the greatest struggle is not clinical, but social. The shadow of stigma still looms large. “If you are affected, and unfortunately you lose your legs, there’s no way the person will be able to make life meaningful for himself. Even my own children, they dissented me. People that I used to eat with, they can’t eat with me,” Eric recounts, echoing his patients’ pain.
He urges empathy and shared responsibility: “The fact that it hasn’t manifested in you doesn’t mean you don’t have it. So we just have to believe each other as people. When somebody has a problem, that is also your problem.”
Often labeled a “disease of the poor,” leprosy’s grip is strengthened by poverty and neglect. “Almost all the people who are largely affected are people who come from poor living conditions. Eighty to ninety percent of the cases are in Africa. Because Africa is highly impoverished,” Eric explains.
Still, hope guides his work. Through outreach, education, and persistent surveillance, the region edges closer to a day when leprosy is history. “If we get to a point where in a population of about 10,000, only one person is likely to have it, that is the aim,” Eric says. “So, in years to come, a generation will come that will not suffer from this kind of disease.”
Until then, the story of leprosy in Ghana’s Upper East is one of vigilance, hope, and the unyielding human spirit, a story that, thanks to people like Eric Dakura, is no longer shrouded in shadows but moving steadily toward the light.
WATCH THE VIDEO DOCUMENTARY:
Source: Apexnewsgh.com/ Ngamegbulam Chidozie Stephen
