Kathmandu, January 25:

Government today declared a target of bringing down the present leprosy prevalence to less then one per 10,000 persons by the end of December and continue reducing leprosy burden.

Dr GD Thakur, director of Leprosy Control Division, said they had started detecting the backlog leprosy patients through chasing approach and clustering of index leprosy patients.

In the first quarter of fiscal year 2008/09, 1,377 new cases of leprosy were registered, according to the Division.