Fiji

In 1911 a leprosarium was set up on Makogai island, east of Suva, Fiji. Here people suffering from leprosy in the Pacific region were sent, including twenty patients from Quail Island, Lyttelton Harbour, NZ.

The Central Leprosy Hospital was built on the island with Fijian government funds and the support of the British Colonial Office. It was staffed principally by Roman Catholic nuns who volunteered to nurse the patients despite the stigma and fear of the illness at the time. The Central Leprosy Hospital served the South Pacific and patients were sent to the island by government health authorities throughout the region.

Such was the stigma and difficulty of treating the disease that patients feared that they were being sent to their death. However, of the 4,500 patients treated on Makogai only 1,500 died and remain buried on the island. Most returned home, their condition improved or in remission.

The leprosarium at Makogai was closed in 1969 and people were moved to the P. J. Twomey Memorial Hospital in Suva. Most of the few remaining individuals either returned home or were relocated to semi-permanent residential care at P.J. Twomey Hospital, built in the same year at Tamavua Heights, Suva, with funds from the New Zealand-based Leprosy Trust Board, now the Pacific Leprosy Foundation.

The closure of Makogai as a leprosy isolation and treatment area was largely a consequence of the emergence of Dapsone as the first antibiotic effective against Mycobacterium Leprae, the organism that causes leprosy. Although the later development of drug-resistant strains of leprosy in some of the Makogai patients was to dampen the hope of the drug as a complete cure, from the 1950s when it was introduced, it offered hope.

As an easily distributed and administered oral antibiotic the drug gave patients on Makogai the opportunity to be free from their disease and from the constraints of in-patient hospital treatment, which had previously relied substantially on painful injections of Chaulmoogra oil. More than this, the early effectiveness of Dapsone enabled most patients to return home to their villages and towns throughout the Pacific.

Source of information: WHO Goodwill Ambassador's Newsletter for the Elimination of Leprosy (28, Oct 2007)

ILEP Co-ordination

There is currently no ILEP National Co-ordinator for Fiji.

a MB = Multibacillary leprosy
b Children are cases of 0 - 14 years
c New G2D = WHO grade 2 disabilities among new cases 

source data: WHO Weekly epidemiological records :No. 13, 2005, 80, 113-124 : No. 34, 2005, 80, 289-296 : No. 32, 2006, 81, 309-316 : No. 25, 2007, 82, 225-232 : No. 33,2008, 83, 293-300, No. 33, 2009, 84, 333-340 : No. 35, 2010, 85, 337-348.  

Important Documents

Article

The Pacific Leprosy Foundation Archive and Oral Historys of Leprosy in the South Pacific

By Jane Buckingham. The Journal of Pacific History, Vol. 41, No. 1, June 2006

A copy of the article is available here