On the other hand, SNOPES labeled this piece of news as FALSE.
SEE HERE:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/leprosy/
(EXCERPT)
The rumor stemmed from a September 2019 opinion piece penned by Dr. Marc Siegel, a doctor of internal medicine at New York University’s Langone medical center. In the piece published by The Hill, Siegel wrote that he feared immigration and a rising homeless population in Los Angeles could be the epicenter of a new leprosy epidemic.
That bit of sensationalism proved tantalizing for many media outlets, which ran with the claim despite the lack of supporting evidence. But if the idea of the dreaded New Testament disease making a resurgence in Hollywood sounds like the plot of a bad movie about End Times, that’s because the claim is false.
The only piece of evidence cited by Siegel was a paper about leprosy cases in Los Angeles. But Dr. Maria Teresa Ochoa, an associate professor of clinical dermatology at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine and a co-author of that paper, told us Siegel’s piece is inaccurate and also appears to exploit two political wedge issues: immigration and homelessness.
Ochoa called the furor over a non-existent leprosy outbreak in Los Angeles “the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen.” Although Siegel claims that most patients cited by the paper are Latinos “originating from Mexico,” and that therefore raises the specter of immigration driving a rise in cases, Ochoa said that’s simply baseless.
“We don’t talk about immigration or the homeless at all” in the paper, she told us. “I don’t have one patient [with the disease] who is homeless.” The reason most of the cases of leprosy cited in the paper were Latino patients was because of demographics: The area of Los Angeles where the clinic is located has a large Latino population.
Ochoa added that Mexico doesn’t have a major public health issue with leprosy. The countries with the biggest infection problems are India, Brazil, and Indonesia.
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