September 9, 2019 – Click here to listen
I was traveling in India several years ago and saw for the first time people with leprosy. I shall never forget looking into the haunted eyes of a beggar who had lost his ears, fingers, and had other open wounds where the disease was ravaging his body. I stopped our taxi and gave the man some money as he stared blankly into my eyes, almost as though he was looking through me.
So, it was with utter amazement that I read that the city of Los Angeles is having an outbreak of this disease. I researched it and discovered that leprosy is not a disease consigned to Biblical times. More than 200,000 new cases are recorded each year globally and three million people are living with irreversible disabilities, including blindness, because of leprosy. Leprosy is a chronic, progressive bacterial infection that causes severe, disfiguring skin sores and nerve damage in the arms, legs, and skin areas around the body. As noted the disease has been around since ancient times, often surrounded by terrifying, negative stigmas and tales of leprosy patients being shunned as outcasts.
How Is Leprosy Contracted? The bacterium Mycobacterium leprae spreads leprosy. The condition is contagious, Untreated individuals can spread the bacteria via droplets from the nose and mouth. The ancients understood the contagious nature of the disease, but not its mechanism. A person is five times more likely to contract the illness than another member of the population if they come into contact with someone with leprosy.
Other diseases in addition to leprosy are reemerging in some parts of America, including Los Angeles County, that we haven’t commonly seen since the Middle Ages. One of those is typhus, a disease carried by fleas that feed on rats, which in turn feed on the garbage and sewage that is prominent in people-packed “typhus zones.” Although typhus can be treated with antibiotics, the challenge is to identify and treat the disease in resistant, hard-to-access populations, such as the homeless or the extremely poor in developing countries.
Dr. Marc Seigel recently prophetically stated: “. . . it seems only a matter of time before leprosy could take hold among the homeless population in an area such as Los Angeles County, with close to 60,000 homeless people and 75 percent of those lacking even temporary shelter or adequate hygiene and medical treatment. All of those factors make a perfect cauldron for a contagious disease that is transmitted by nasal droplets and respiratory secretions with close repeated contact.” Indeed, a study just released from the Keck Medical Center at the University of Southern California looked at 187 leprosy patients treated at its clinic and found that most were Latino, originating from Mexico, where the disease is somewhat more common. Leprosy is still more prevalent in Central America and South America, with more than 20,000 new cases per year. Given that, there is certainly the possibility of sporadic cases of leprosy continuing to be brought across our southern border undetected.
In the days of Christ lepers were treated as outcasts and had to warn others, “Unclean” when anyone approached. Jesus famously healed several lepers during His time on earth. My heart goes out to these poor souls and I pray they can find treatment. The disease can be successfully treated but unfortunately leaves devastating disfigurement, nerve damage and other problems in its wake.
Although we can’t know all the reasons that God allows disease into our lives, biblical leprosy is a powerful symbol reminding us of sin’s spread and its horrible consequences. Like leprosy, sin starts out small but can then spread, leading to other sins and causing great damage to our relationship with God and others.
The people who promote allowing anyone and everyone to simply walk across our border and then tolerate the filth of the drug infested, homeless camps on the streets of LA, San Francisco and elsewhere are no doubt genuinely trying to help. But it is so misguided. What has been lost in this country is common sense. Do we want to take the United States back to the middle ages? We can help people more by teaching them to help themselves. Like sin the worst thing possible is to simply ignore the problem and allow it to continue to destroy.
1 Corinthians 15:57
But thank God! He gives us victory over sin and death through our Lord Jesus Christ.