From the late 1940s, the Methodist Leprosy Settlement at Uzuakoli, in what is now Abia State, hosted clinical work that would change global medicine. Researchers there were among the first to systematically trial Dapsone (DDS — diaminodiphenyl sulfone) on leprosy patients.
The drug worked. Patients improved. The protocol developed at Uzuakoli would in time be adopted by the World Health Organization as part of the global standard treatment for leprosy, and would help eliminate the disease as a public health crisis in dozens of countries.
Leprosy had been one of humanity’s most feared and socially devastating diseases for thousands of years. The contribution of a Methodist mission settlement in Eastern Nigeria to its eradication is a documented chapter in both medical and religious history that is largely absent from contemporary Nigerian public memory.