Lalgadh staff to attend the International Leprosy Congress in Manila

The International Leprosy Congress only happens every four years, and is an important opportunity for scientists, researchers, health staff partners and individuals affected by leprosy to interact, discuss and share experiences in their work across a variety of fields in the leprosy world. The aim of the Congress is to foster a global partnership in addressing the current challenges of leprosy, with the aim of reaching “zero transmission, zero disability, and zero discrimination”. This year it is being held in Manila in The Phillipines.

We have usually managed to send a senior member of our staff to previous congresses, but this year we have a special challenge. In 2018 our partner American Leprosy Missions provided some ‘research methodology’ training to our staff at Lalgadh, and as a result, a number of them submitted papers for presentation at the Congress. Amazingly, nine of them were accepted and so there are nine members of Lalgadh staff who would like to join this valuable experience of work in leprosy around the world.  If that seems a lot, apparently 22 members of the Anandaban Leprosy Hospital team in Kathmandu are going!

American Leprosy Missions are very kindly fully sponsoring two of our staff to attend and are part sponsoring a third. We have managed to find the funds for a further member of staff, and are hoping that we can raise some further funds for more staff, as this is such an exciting opportunity to develop our staff and encourage them at the same time.

Well done to our amazing staff at Lalgadh for producing some really good presentations!