1 December 2020

WHO Technical Guidance: Leprosy/Hansen’s disease contact tracing and post-exposure prophylaxis

“In order to bring down the case detection among leprosy contacts from Point A to Point B, programmes can choose to treat 100 contacts with leprosy and nobody with chemoprophylaxis or provide chemoprophylaxis to all contacts and treat only 43 leprosy patients”. The latter choice is the most obvious for many programmes. This document provides guidance on how to implement contact screening and chemoprophylaxis with single-dose rifampicin. The contents are logically ordered: counselling and obtaining consent, identification and listing of index case, listing of contacts, tracing of contacts, screening of contacts, administration of prophylactic drugs. Managerial aspects to undertake contact screening and chemoprophylaxis are also elaborated, including planning, training, supervision and drug management.

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