Hansen's disease project focus of teen

• By DEBRA LEMOINE
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Apr 30, 2009 - Page: 1E

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Elizabeth “B.B.” Blanchard, 16, didn’t think much about a spot she had assumed was a scar from a caterpillar sting the summer before.

Her friends kept asking her about the red, raised mark on the back of her calf as it spread to her foot and her knee, so she knew she needed to see a doctor.

“I said, ‘Wait. Scars don’t spread,’” B.B. Blanchard said.

Her dermatologist had never seen anything like it before and took biopsies.

The St. Joseph’s Academy sophomore said she never imagined that she had a disease she had learned about in religion classes — leprosy.

Hansen’s disease, the newer name for leprosy, is a misunderstood bacterial infection that has been around for thousands of years. In this past century, people with leprosy were sent to a former sugar plantation in Carville to live out their lives in forced isolation.

For B.B. Blanchard, there is no stigma. She took a course of antibiotics for six months, and the disease is gone.

A small scar remains on the back of her leg that she said feels odd when touched.

“She’s very open about it,” said Dr. James Krahenbuhl, director for the National Hansen’s Disease Programs based in Baton Rouge. “In another time, in another country, she wouldn’t be so open about it. It would destroy her family.”

In the 17 months since her initial diagnosis, B.B. Blanchard is gradually becoming a spokeswoman for Hansen’s disease, and for how it can and should be treated in this day and age.

Her experience has gotten her featured in two national news articles: one in The Washington Post and another in People magazine.

Producers for “Oprah” and with “Inside Edition” have called her, but she has yet to go on national television, her mother, Anne Blanchard, said. Activists in leprosy charities also have sought her assistance, but she has yet to commit, her mother said.

“I just want to live a normal life,” B.B. Blanchard explained.