Savior of lepers in Pakistan

RUTH PFAU Sept. 9, 1929 - Aug. 10, 2017

Ruth Pfau, a Germanborn medical missionary who was hailed as the “Mother Teresa of Pakistan” for her role in containing leprosy, died Aug. 10 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.”

Less than four decades after Dr. Pfau 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.

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.

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.

Once leprosy was declared under control, the center also focused on tuberculosis, blindness and other diseases and on disabilities.