About 72% knew that leprosy is curable and 86.3% would advise medical treatment.
Only 19.7% of respondents knew the cause of leprosy, and a considerable proportion linked it to a spell (25.3%), unclean blood (15.5%) and heredity (14.6%). Information on leprosy was mainly from community volunteers (40.6%), friends (38.0%), and the media (24%). Binary logistic regression was used to determine independent predictors of negative attitudes.Ībout 82% of respondents had heard about, and 64.4% knew someone with leprosy. A questionnaire designed to evaluate knowledge, perceptions and attitudes about leprosy was used.
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We carried out a cross-sectional community survey of 233 respondents aged 15–75 years, free from leprosy, and living in two rural health districts of the South-west Region of Cameroon.
This study aimed at exploring the knowledge, perceptions and attitudes regarding leprosy in rural Cameroon. Misconceptions about leprosy leads to stigma towards people with the disease. The paper argues that if there are enough written material and text books on CPE, it will be an appropriate language for use as a medium of instruction in the early years of schooling and for the education of Cameroonian adult illiterates.Īlthough leprosy is one of the oldest diseases known to humanity, it remains largely misunderstood.
Another claim in this paper is that Cameroonians consider CPE as a more natural and unifying language which "grows" in their eyes and which transcends geographical and political boundaries, because it is not a language of a particular ethnic group and thus goes beyond the reproach of tribalism. The paper shows that CPE is viable, flexible and practical, and that Cameroonians are more comfortable using this language, which they consider to be an indigenous language, than using either French or English the official languages. Because of this linguistic diversity, Cameroonians have devised a means of a common linguistic identity-Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE)-through which they can understand each other. Cameroon, like some African countries, has a complex language situation in the sense that in addition to the two official languages (French and English), many indigenous languages do exist.