By SAM ROBERTS
Ruth Pfau in Jati, Pakistan PHOTO/Asif Hassan/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Dr. Ruth Pfau, a German-born medical missionary who was hailed as the “Mother Teresa of Pakistan” for her pivotal role in containing leprosy there, died on Thursday in a hospital in Karachi. She was 87.
Her death was announced by Prime Minister Shahid Abbasi, who said she would receive a state funeral. She had kidney and heart disease.
“Dr. 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. Although she was born in Germany, he added, “her heart was always in Pakistan.”
Leprosy, a disfiguring and stigmatizing ailment also known as Hansen’s disease, can now be prevented and even cured after early diagnosis.
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).
Dr. Pfau, who had converted to Roman Catholicism and become a nun, discovered her calling to help lepers coincidentally.
In 1960, she was waylaid in Pakistan by a passport foul-up en route to a posting in India by her Roman Catholic order, the Society of Daughters of the Heart of Mary. By chance, she visited a leper colony in Karachi, where she met one of the thousands of Pakistani patients afflicted with the disease.
“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. “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. She soon transformed it into the hub of a network of 157 medical centers that treated tens of thousands of Pakistanis infected with leprosy.
Funded mostly by German, Austrian and Pakistani donors, the center and its satellite clinics also treated victims of the 2000 drought in Balochistan, the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir and devastating floods in 2010.
Once leprosy was declared under control, the center also focused on tuberculosis, blindness and other diseases and on disabilities, some caused by land mines in war-torn Afghanistan.
Dr. Pfau was often compared to Mother Teresa (now Saint Teresa of Calcutta), the nun, born in what is today Macedonia, who ministered to the poor in India.
Mervyn Lobo, the chief executive of the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Center, said that Dr. Pfau had “played a dynamic role in removing the stigma attached to the healing of leprosy patients.”
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