Advances in Infectious Diseases, 2013, 3, 269-273 Published Online December 2013 (http://www.scirp.org/journal/aid) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/aid.2013.34041 Open Access AID 269 A Clinco-Bacteriological Study of Leprosy in Paediatric Age Group *# Leena Das 1 , Bijay Kumar Meher 1 , Nikunja Bihari Das 2 , Deepti Damayanty Pradhan 1 , S. Pradeep 1 , Jayashree Mohanty 3 1 Department of Paediatrics, S.V.P. Post Graduate Institute of Paediatrics, SCBMCH, Cuttack, India; 2 Pediatric Specialist, Commu- nity Health Centre (CHC), Chikiti, Ganjam, India; 3 Department of Dermatology, S.C.B. Medical College, Cuttack, India. Email: bkmeher187@yahoo.co.in Received October 23 rd , 2013; revised November 23 rd , 2013; accepted November 30 th , 2013 Copyright © 2013 Leena Das et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ABSTRACT Clinico-bacteriological study was done in 51 leprosy patients below 14 years of age. Majority of the patients were males in the age group of 11 - 14 years. Nearly 84% had not received any prior treatment because of lack of awareness and financial constraints. Only 11.76% had a positive contact history. Skin lesions were present in all cases and 84.3% had lesions mainly on the exposed areas of the body and their number was found to increase significantly with advancing age (p < 0.005). These lesions were hypo-pigmented patches in 88% cases. 88% of cases had hypo-anesthesia and nerve thickening was observed in 24% cases. The most common type of skin lesion was borderline tuberculoid (BT) in 53% cases. Positivity of the skin smears increased significantly as the number of the skin lesions per patient increased (p < 0.001). Multibacillary cases were seen in 15.6% of cases and found only in the age group of 10 - 14 years of age. No statistically significant association between BCG vaccination and prevention of leprosy was seen. Keywords: Leprosy in Children; Tuberculoid Leprosy; BCG 1. Introduction Leprosy is probably the oldest disease known to mankind. It is a chronic infectious disease caused by Mycobacte- rium leprae. It is one of the leading causes of physical disabilities which contribute to intense social stigma, re- sulting in discrimination of the patient and their families. According to world statistics at the beginning of 2006, the number of leprosy cases in the world was 22 million. Today the highest burden of cases of world is concentrat- ed in 6 countries and India remains at the top [1]. India accounts for 55% of the new leprosy cases detected glo- bally in 2010 [2]. According to the National Leprosy Eli- mination Programme (NLEP) report of March 2012, there were a total of about 0.13 million cases of leprosy in In- dia, 9.7% of which were children. In Odisha, the preva- lence rate (PR) of childhood leprosy is 1.06/10,000 popu- lation [3]. The profile and magnitude of leprosy in pedi- atric populations have an important bearing on the epide- miology of the disease and reflect the level of control in a community. A high child proportion signifies active and recent transmission of the disease, making it a robust epi- demiological indicator to assess the progress of leprosy control programmes. It is expected to fall towards the eli- mination phase of a leprosy control programme, suggest- ing a decrease in transmission levels [4]. A multistage cluster sampling survey in north Bangladesh demonstrat- ed that the prevalence of previously undiagnosed leprosy in children (5 - 14 years old) was 8.6 per 10,000 [5]. In the pediatric age group, leprosy often presents as a single hypopigmented patch, which may or may not be anesthe- tic, and hence it is confused with other dermatological ail- ments [6]. With this background, we carried out this pre- sent work to study the clinico-bacteriological status of le- prosy patients under 14 years of age. Objective  Assessment of the Clinico-bacteriological status of childhood leprosy patients at a tertiary level hospital. * Conflict of interest: none. # Funding: none.  Smear positivity status in BCG vaccinated children.