Leprosy and blindness

Among those that OW want us to pray for in India today are two categories with staggering statistics:

Leprosy sufferers, of which there are 150,000 new cases every year. Leprosy originated in India. It still possesses the majority of the world’s cases, and there are over 1,000 leper colonies in India. Christian agencies work with them, in particular TLM (18 leprosy hospitals and around 100 projects).

[Wikipedia says leprosy currently affects approximately a quarter of a million people throughout the world, with 70% of these cases occurring in India. Cases there have decreased dramatically from 5,000,000 cases in 1985 to 213,000 cases in 2009. This significant decrease is largely due to the effectiveness of multi-drug therapy (MDT) that was developed in 1981. The prevalence of leprosy in India is now less than 1 case in 10,000 individuals, meeting the WHO criteria for leprosy elimination. Yet the WHO criterion for elimination is not met in all areas of the country; rural areas and urban slums continue to experience up to five times the number of leprosy cases as the national average.]

The blind. As many as 15 million people in India are blind (and another 50 million visually impaired) – this is nearly 40% of the world’s total. Of these cases, 70% would be preventable were there sufficient doctors and optometrists. Braille is an under-utilized tool. Agencies with ministry to blind people are Mission to the Blind, India Fellowship for Visually Handicapped and Torch Trust for the Blind. Compass Braille is an agency specializing in producing Braille Scriptures in Indian languages by means of computer. Christian audio resources such as Megavoice, Proclaimer and others are vital for reaching and discipling India's blind people.

Like snow

I'm around halfway through Philip Eveson's commentary on Leviticus now. this paragraph on p 175 let in some shafts of light.

If the skin condition has covered the whole body and left the skin white all over, then the priest can pronounce the person clean (13:12-13). This has caused headaches to many people because they have understood ‘white’ to signify a leprous condition. The confusion has been caused by translators adding ‘white as’ when the word ‘snow’ is used of leprosy in Numbers 12:12 and 2 Kings 5:27. But the colour ‘white’ is not found in the original text of these verses. Sufferers from bad dandruff, when they comb their hair, find particles of dry skin on their clothes like flakes of snow. That is the point of the comparison. Both Miriam and Gehazi were leprous ‘like snow’, not in the sense that their skin became ‘white like snow’, but that it became ‘flaky like snow’. One of the two miraculous signs that God gave Moses was that his hand became leprous ‘like snow’, in the sense of ‘flaky like snow’, and then was restored again like the rest of his skin (Exod. 4:6-7).
The whiteness of the skin in the present passage is therefore not a sign of leprosy but of clean skin after a leprous skin disorder. It is like new white skin after scabs have peeled off.