Dr. Ruth Pfau, Savior of Lepers in Pakistan, Dies at 87
Ruth came to Pakistan here at the dawn of a young nation, looking to make lives better for those afflicted by disease,
and in doing so, found herself a home," Mr. Abbasi said.
"That one visit, the sights I saw during it, made me make a key life decision." Dr. Pfau joined the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Center, opened in 1956 in the Karachi slums
and named for a founder of the order of nuns that ran it.
Less than four decades after Dr. Pfau (pronounced fow) began her campaign to contain leprosy, a mildly contagious bacterial infection, the World Health Organization
declared it under control in Pakistan in 1996, ahead of most other Asian countries (although several hundred new cases are still reported there annually).
"He must have been my age — I was at this time not yet 30 — and he crawled on hands and feet into this dispensary, acting as if this was quite normal," she told the BBC in 2010, "as if someone has to crawl there through
that slime and dirt on hands and feet, like a dog." The encounter stunned her.
"I could not believe that humans could live in such conditions," she told the Pakistani newspaper The Express Tribune in 2014.