History of chemotherapy of leprosy

Abstract

Chemotherapy of leprosy over the past 70 years has passed through several phases, from sulfones, to clofazimine, and to highly bactericidal drugs like rifampicin. The use particularly of the more potent drugs in effective combinations and the development of standard multidrug therapy regimens have made a huge difference in the successful treatment of leprosy as well as in reducing tremendously the prevalence of leprosy globally. A major contributing factor to development of better drugs and drug combinations has been the introduction of the mouse footpad model to evaluate the in vivo activity of drugs against Mycobacterium leprae. The World Health Organization has recommended multidrug therapy, which has been used to treat more than 15 million patients in the last 30 years and has set an excellent record with regard to its very high rate of cure, very low occurrence of relapse, and very rare occurrence of drug resistance.