Community Awareness, Attitude to Extension Program and Leprosy

The goals of the leprosy elimination programme are to increase community awareness and participation; to improve the capacity of general health workers in diagnosis and treatment; and to detect cases that have remained undetected in the community and to cure them by providing free access to multi drug therapy. Many leprosy patients also experience rejection from the society and are not able to find employment due to the stigma attached to the disease. The social problems encountered in leprosy control and management include patients' delay in seeking treatment, non-compliance with medication or self-care and leprosy stigma. The result of illness behavior showed that leprosy attacks mostly hands, lips and head of an individual. Therefore, the community members should take into account any wound happened to this parts of the body and get physician counseling. The results have shown that the type of services that is provided for the community is not satisfactory. Therefore, the health centers should improve the service type that they are rendering to the community in order to provide 16 services of health extension services to the community.