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The best treatment, most doctors agree, would be a vaccine. Researchers have been working with armadillos, which are among the few animals susceptible to leprosy. Leprosy bacteria taken from infected armadillos are killed and used in an experimental vaccine. Results of tests in animals are encouraging. Tests of the vaccine in humans will probably begin in two or three years, but because of leprosy's long incubation period, it will be more than a decade before results are known.
A successful vaccine would finally put an end to the age-old taint that lepers bear. Even today, patients, though treated and no longer contagious, carry the onus. "I feel ashamed," says Leni Ignosta, 20, a Los Angeles welder who contracted leprosy five years ago in Samoa before moving to the U.S. "I don't want anybody to know I have it, not even my family. I wanted to stay in the U.S., but I think I'll go back to Samoa and live by myself." ∎