Word: kalaupapa
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...heroic virtues" of Father Damien, the first step on the road toward sainthood for the Belgian-born missionary. Famed for his devotion to victims of leprosy in Hawaii, Father Damien followed a calling that led to his death from the disease. Now the leprosarium that he made famous, Kalaupapa, is dying of attrition-and for the most welcome reasons: new cases of the disease have become rare among ethnic Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians, and leprosy can be treated so successfully today that newly identified patients soon become noncontagious. The savage isolationism of the past has been replaced by an enlightened...
Except for what nature, in an eruption of volcanic anger, has left ugly and almost immutable, there was little visible to recall Kalaupapa's dismal history as the plane circled to land on a short but well-blacktopped strip. During the drive to the health department offices and the hospital with Dr. Leslie Charles Koch, chief of Hawaii's State Leprosy Control Program, who was making one of his twice-weekly visits to the colony, there were cheery waves and "Alohas" from patients...
...defenses. Soon hundreds of new cases were being reported annually. The panic that had swept Europe during its epidemics centuries earlier was repeated in Hawaii. In 1865, King Kamehameha V ordered all lepers confined to the most desolate part of his realm, the volcanic, 14-sq.-mi. peninsula of Kalaupapa jutting northward from the coast of Molokai. The first 35 patients were landed in January 1866, with no more food and clothing than they could carry on their backs...
...Public Health Service's Dr. Leroy E. Burney visited Kalaupapa last year to see whether the 95-year-old leprosy colony should be amalgamated with the only continental U.S. leprosarium, in Carville, La. Burney's conclusion: both should continue, for the time being. But Kalaupapa's life, at least as a leprosy settlement, appears limited. Hawaii has reported only 16 new cases of leprosy thus far this year (as compared to 94 in 1920), and less than half required hospitalization. Says Dr. Ira D. Hirschy. director of Hawaii's leprosy program: "As soon as the medical...
...present operation is showing results." Five bills were introduced after the Governor's message, but none was for immediate action. One asked for a survey of leprosy in Hawaii and a report to the next session; another asked for more research. The others would make life easier at Kalaupapa by such details as allowing photographs to be sent home (now only scientific pictures...