Culion: the island of the "last generation" of lepers

By Rene Flipo

CULION, Philippines (AFP): Culion, the Philippine's "Lepers Island," is seeking to forget its past despite the sufferers who still inhabit its streets. It may soon do so.

Since 1982, when a multi-drug treatment program run with the help of the World Health Organization began, the number of cases of leprosy has dropped steadily from around 7,000 to only 32 active cases today, all of whom are under treatment.

The success of the program is principally due to the almost total isolation of this island of 15,000 residents, just north of the island of Palawan. Many Philippine lepers still want to come here for treatment, but the island is refusing to accept them.

"If leprosy comes into the island, it will be from the inside now, not from the outside," said Arturo Cunanan, a 39-year-old doctor here whose maternal grandmother died of the disease. Today, Cunanan administers the treatment program.

Beginning in 1905, when the Philippines was under U.S. jurisdiction, lepers were separated from the general population and police forced them to Culion, where missionaries could only dress their wounds and comfort the dying.

During World War II, Japanese occupiers launched a naval blockade of the island in an effort to isolate and exterminate the lepers, who tried every means possible to leave the island and find food.

Several years after the war, a portal divided the city into a leper side and a leper-free side. People could pass through to visit relatives, but a visitor who stayed too long would be forced to the other side of the wall.

Today, "we hope this is the last generation of invalids," said Cunanan.

Culion held its first mayoral election last May and was reintegrated onto the country's administrative map. Hilarion Guia, the first mayor of Culion, is himself a former leper, the disease costing him all his fingers. He too intends to see to it that his home will no longer be known as "the island for the living dead."

Leprosy is a chronic infectious disease of the skin, tissues and nerves characterized by ulcers, white scaly scabs, deformities and wasting of body parts.

Cunanan spends his mornings treating the wounds of those who still have "active" cases of leprosy. He also aids the former lepers who have become "negative," but for whom the deformities caused by the disease are irreversible.

Jose Dino, 59, is now a "negative" case. He has lost an eye, his nose, half his mouth, half his left leg and nearly all his fingers. His wife died in 1972 from the disease, and Dino says, with humor, "I chose not to remarry."

After treatment with three drugs recommended by the World Health Organization, "one doctor came to me one day and said I had been declared negative," Dino said.

"But what's the use? Look at me. How can I have any social life?"

Many in Culion suffer in similar circumstances. They sleep, they play chess, and most of the time they are idle. For the rest of the inhabitants, accustomed to the problems of the lepers, their presence poses no problem.

Culion is the oldest of eight leprosy sanatoriums in the Philippines and it is where the ill have been cured in the greatest number. Cunahan said he hopes the island will soon be declared "leprosy free."