<P> In June 1972 an eradication programme was started . The project was based on the work of Enno Freerksen, Director of the Borsal Institute in Hamburg . Dr Freerksen's earlier trial had used rifampacin, izoniazid, dapsone and prothionamide . The Malta project used rifampacin, dapsone and clofamazine . The project formally concluded in 1999 having treated about 300 patients . </P> <P> The last leper colony in Europe is at Tichileşti, Romania . Until 1991 patients were not allowed to leave the colony . At this colony patients get food, a place to sleep, clothes and medical attention . Some live in long pavilions and others in houses with vegetable and flower gardens . There are two churches in the colony - Orthodox and Baptist - and a farm where the colony grows its own corn . </P> <P> There were cases of leprosy in Atlantic Canada at the end of the nineteenth century, beginning in 1815 . The patients were first housed on Sheldrake Island in the Miramichi River and later transferred to Tracadie . Catholic nuns (the religieuses hospitalières de Saint - Joseph, RHSJ) came to take care of the sick . They opened the first French - language hospital in New Brunswick and many more followed . Many hospitals opened by the RHSJ nuns are still in use today . The last hospital to house lepers in Tracadie was demolished in 1991 . Its lazaretto section had been closed since 1965 . In a century of existence, it had housed not only Acadian victims of the disease, but people from all over Canada as well as sick immigrants from Iceland, Russia and China, among other nations . </P> <P> Cape Breton Island also suffered an outbreak, in the Lake Ainslie region . Nine people were affected, but it died out soon after 1882 . Another outbreak of twenty cases occurred in the Lake O'Law region around 1852 . </P>

How many cases of leprosy in the world