Researchers analyzed the genomes of leprosy-causing bacteria collected from seven patients and one armadillo.
By the mid-1960s, an Israeli doctor was using it for ENL, a complication of leprosy.
It was revived by Celgene and approved in 1998 as a treatment for leprosy.
The ban also restricts entry and travel for people with sexually transmitted diseases and leprosy.
"This is an important step toward the development of innovative prevention and treatment strategies for leprosy", stated Dr Schurr.
However, it added a new worry: that eliminating leprosy might not be possible either.
Looking at skin lesions in leprosy patients, the team found that two different immune proteins were present.
Thalomid had been approved for leprosy the year before, but it very quickly became used mostly for myeloma.
"Leprosy is a rare disease and will remain a rare disease, " he says.
After all, thalidomide is still used as a treatment for multiple myeloma (a plasma cell cancer) and leprosy.
Fortunately, public relations is something that leprosy officials seem to be good at.
That is because a lot of basic information about leprosy is still missing.
Although the lesion looked only slightly abnormal, a series of lab tests revealed that it was a symptom of leprosy.
He said leprosy was a feared disease and that people with leprosy were often cast out of society and shunned.
The goal is to eliminate the following diseases by 2020: Guinea worm, leprosy, lymphatic filariasis, blinding trachoma and sleeping sickness.
It hopes to follow that up with three further eradications, including leprosy, in the first two decades of the next century.
Whereas in patients with a more serious form of leprosy, a protein associated with a viral response - interferon-beta - was prominent.
Funding bodies assumed that basic research into leprosy was becoming irrelevant, since the problem was being solved where it counted in the field.
Rebranding may also come to the rescue of the Leprosy Elimination Programme.
Their Foundation has committed funds to catalyze investments in simple, effective and cheap cures for diseases such as river blindness, elephantiasis and leprosy.
Each year only about 150 people in the U.S. are infected with leprosy, a bacterial disease that can lead to nerve damage and disfigurement.
From the 19th Century until the 1960s, it served as a secure mental hospital and before that, it was an island for leprosy patients.
Looking for a cheap replacement, he came up with a combination of dapsone, an old leprosy medication, and chlorproguanil or Lapudrine, an old malaria prophylactic.
The leathery shelled mammals, which can be found in 10 states throughout the Southeastern U.S., are the only animals besides humans known to carry leprosy.
However, she said the new theory did not explain why places like India and Ethiopia still have relatively high levels of both leprosy and TB.
However, she cautioned that there was "quite a gap between this and clinical leprosy and I don't think it's going to lead to new treatments".
And the stuff is also smuggled in from places such as Brazil, where controls are laxer and where endemic leprosy means that thalidomide use is widespread.
The armadillo population in the U.S. has been estimated at 30 to 50 million, and studies suggest that, in some places, up to 15 percent have leprosy.
Of the 50 patients and 33 wild armadillos the researchers analyzed from the U.S., 25 patients and 28 armadillos shared a genetically identical strain of leprosy bacteria.
Celgene 's (nasdaq: CELG - news - people ) Thalomid was approved to treat leprosy but is used mainly as a life-saving cancer medicine.
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