New Delhi, Jan. 30: Tweaking language and medical terminology, health officials today announced that India had achieved “national elimination” of leprosy, but warned that eradication of the disease is still decades away.

The number of leprosy patients on record in India had dropped from 149,000 in April 2005 to 107,000 in December 2005, or a prevalence rate of 0.95 per 10,000 people, health officials said, describing this as “elimination”.

They cited a World Health Organisation (WHO) decision to label any prevalence rate below one per 10,000 people as elimination of leprosy as a public health problem.

“This is only a milestone. We’re on our way to eradication, but that could be two decades away,” health minister Anbumani Ramadoss said.

However, despite the claim of elimination as a public health problem, experts point out that the government’s own data suggest that India could continue to detect tens of thousands of new cases of leprosy each year.

While the number of leprosy patients on record had dropped from 149,000 in April 2005 to 107,000 cases by December 2005, government clinics also detected 127,000 new cases of leprosy over the past eight months.

A health official said that as the newly-detected cases are treated with multi-drug therapy for leprosy, they will not add significantly to the prevalence rate. “Patients get cured after six months to 12 months of therapy,” Gajinder Singh, deputy director-general of the leprosy control programme, said.

However, a senior expert said a large proportion of patients with a particularly severe form of leprosy are likely to have continued bacterial activity even after the completion of treatment.

“Cases of leprosy being treated in the private sector would not even figure in the government records,” the expert said. “Elimination is only by definition.”

Singh said 26 states have achieved the “elimination level”. But Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh and Bengal continue to have prevalence rates between one and three per 10,000 population. These six states account for 60 per cent of the total caseload of patients, he said.

Bengal accounts for 12 per cent of the load of patients. Two districts of Delhi have the highest prevalence rates of more than five per 10,000 people. Chandigarh also has high prevalence rate. Health officials attribute the high rates in Delhi and Chandigarh to the large influx of patients from other states to hospitals in the two cities seeking treatment.

The health ministry today also announced plans to enhance facilities for reconstructive surgery in select medical centres to be offered to persons disabled by leprosy and to continue building capacity of staff involved in leprosy detection and treatment.