Mary Stone worked at Kumi, Uganda, and was involved in overseeing the BCG trials conducted there with Dr Kinnear Brown. She retired in November 1970 and was awarded an MBE for twenty-one years of work in Uganda.

In a letter from 1957, she wrote of her work in the laboratory:

In the laboratory I have been very interested to make a start with some investigation work. Dr Brown, the Specialist Leprologist to the Ugandan Government, is staying here for varying lengths of time showing me how to do this work. It was towards this end that I did some laboratory work in England last year. Leprosy is always associated with certain changes in the structure of the skin, and a more detailed examination with the microscope of specially prepared sections of skin is valuable not only in diagnosis but also in estimating the patient’s progress. It will also have a bearing on the type of treatment used.

The following year she stated that, "We are now following up with some very interesting experimental test work under the guidance of Dr Kinnear Brown, the Uganda Leprologist, which may well add to present knowledge and open the way for inoculation against leprosy in susceptible cases."

Later in 1958, Dr Maurice Lea reported that,

Mary Stone, our Matron, has put in a lot of hard work in learning the job of being a Lab technician, and Dr Kinnear Brown, the Protectorate Leprologist, has been using our team and our resources for some really exciting research work, both in the way in which leprosy spreads and more thrilling still, it looks as though we are making real progress in learning how to prevent it altogether. This is part of a much larger scheme, with branches in other leprosy centres all over the world, organised by the Medical Research Council in London. The workers in their Lab at Mill Hill sometimes need fresh leprosy tissue with living germs still in it, and we get it to them. We arrange to have an operating day on the last day of a visit from the Protectorate Leprologist, and the necessary specimen from a patient who needs an operation is packed in ice in a specially designed sort of thermos flask. Dr Brown then takes it back to Entebbe in his car and sees it on the afternoon plane from the Airport. Fourteen hours later it is being met at London Airport by one of the people from Mill Hill, and in just over 24 hours from the time it left the Ongino operating theatre, it is in the Mill Hill laboratory.

One of the jobs (and this again mostly devolves on Mary Stone) is to get all the details we can about the families of people with leprosy. This needs a lot of hard work and a pretty good knowledge of the language ... we are building up a picture of the way in which leprosy spreads in a community like this. It looks as though about 95% of people are immune altogether, and the remaining 5% are susceptible in different degrees ... So Mary and I have been going round the schools in the neighbourhood, testing children for their susceptibility to TB and inoculating those that are susceptible, in order to prevent them from getting that at any rate. We have not yet got a certain method of telling whether folk are susceptible to leprosy, but we have got a skin test which tells us something about it, and it is beginning to look as though the inoculation against TB really may make people less susceptible to leprosy. We are only at the beginning of this, and it is much too early to be sure, but all the same we here at Kumi and Ongino, and people at many other leprosy places scattered over the world (co-ordinated by the MRC, who are doing the high-powered lab work with facilities beyond us in the middle of Africa) are all taking part in an all-out campaign, not merely to treat leprosy but to find a means of preventing it altogether, and so finally stamping it out of the world.

(122/3 Kumi and Ongino, 13 November 1958, Archives from the Leprosy Mission International)

In the Medical Superintendent's Report of 1958, from Kumi/Ongino Leprosy Centre, Kumi/Ongino Leprosy Centre: Medical Superintendent’s Report 1958, it is reported that, "Dr J Kinnear Brown has continued to organise investigations in the laboratory with the object of providing a modified lepromin test. A great deal of the practical work has been done by Miss M Stone. A negative lepromin result implies impaired resistance to leprosy. ... The test has assumed more importance because BCG vaccination is usually followed by a negative response becoming positive .... Miss Stone (CMS) Matron has been doing most of the increasingly important routine work in connection with the research programme described above, and one paper has already been published under the joint names of Dr Kinnear Brown and her own. She is going on furlough in March."

In the Medical Superintendent’s Report for 1959 for Kumi/Ongino Leprosy Centre, we learn that careful studies have also been made of family histories and connections of patients in a number of leprosy treatment villages in Teso District, in the hope of some of the evidence obtained will eventually provide details of past trends in the epidemiology of the disease, which we can then compare with what is taking place today."

This work is further explained by Mary Stone in her letter of June 1961:

It involves tracing all under fifteen who are blood relatives of known patients who are living in contact of have lived in contact with them. It is believed in Uganda that relationship may be as important as contact and concentration on related contacts will discover those children who are most at risk. Each child is tested with tuberculin and alternate children are vaccinated against tuberculosis. All will be examined every two years for both leprosy and tuberculosis, and it is hoped over the next five or ten years to get some evidence as to whether the vaccinated or unvaccinated group will contain the greater number of leprosy patients. In addition, half of the children are being tested with a special lepromin test developed and proved in Uganda, most of the work having been done at Kumi-Ongino. The results of the tuberculin and lepromin tests before and after vaccination, and the number of new cases of leprosy, will be taken into account when deciding whether or not there is a relation between the two diseases and whether vaccination against one will effectively limit the other.

The object of the scheme is to test 12 000 child relatives. To obtain this number it may be necessary to cover the whole of the district, which has a population of 4 000 000. This is complicated by the fact that the people are widely dispersed in families living on scattered small holdings, for in this country there are few villages or towns. It is obviously an ambitious task but already over 1 000 children have been dealt with. The work is being carried out as a cooperative effort by the staff of the Settlement and that of the Ministry of Health under the direction of Dr Kinnear Brown, and is being financed by the MRC with money given by the Colonial Development and Welfare Fund.

At the beginning of 1962, with Ugandan independence looming, Mary Stone wrote, "Our BCG research scheme is going forward very happily. We are now quite a large team with two full time office clerks and two leprosy assistants, one of whom can now drive a car and is able to help me quite considerably doing independent safaris. We have now completed 10 000 of the proposed target of 12 000 children. (122/3 Kumi and Ongino, Letter from Mary Stone, 2 January 1962, Archives of the Leprosy Mission International).

In August she wrote, "The BCG research trial is coming to the end of its first phase. We have taken in almost 19 000 children into the scheme altogether, half of whom have been vaccinated with BCG and half left as controls. When I come back from leave next year we shall begin the second round to check these children to see whether there is any appreciable difference in numbers of children who develop leprosy in the two groups. This has been a fascinating piece of work (122/3 Kumi and Ongino, Letter from Mary Stone, 24 August 1962, Archives of the Leprosy Mission International).

In a further letter in November she noted that, "By the beginning of September, the target of 18 000 children who were blood relations of known cases of leprosy had been examined, and half of those who were found to be tuberculin negative had been vaccinated with BCG. The next step will be the painstaking follow up of all these children over at least the next five years, after which it will be possible to see if there is a significant difference in the incidence of leprosy in the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups." (122/3 Kumi and Ongino, Letter from Mary Stone, November 1962, Archives of the Leprosy Mission International).

In 1965, the BCG trial involved follow ups: "The work during the past year has consisted in following them up to see how many of them show early signs of leprosy. The results are encouraging and are at present being evaluated prior to early publication." (122/3 Kumi and Ongino, Medical Secretary's Report 1965, Archives of the Leprosy Mission International).

In 1967, when Dr Lea retired and was replaced by Dr Dundas Moore (LEPRA), in July 1966, a third recheck of all children involved in the trial was carried out. (132/3 Kumi, 1967-69, Medical Secretary's Report 1967, Archives of the Leprosy Mission International).

In 1968, it was reported that, "The BCG trial against leprosy continues. A second paper has been published in the BMJ on January 7th giving further information of our progress. The trial still shows that about 85% of children under trial condition are protected from developing leprosy over a period of seven years, the length of the trial period.

This entry was updated on 6 October 2006.

Treatment Used/Researched:
Immunoprophylaxis and Immunotherapy