This article is part of HuffPosts Project Zero campaign, a yearlong series on neglected tropical diseases and efforts to fight them.

YANGON, Myanmar Su Myant Sandar was 17 when she first noticed a red patch on her cheek. At the time, she was working with her girlfriends at a garment factory on the poor outskirts of this city. She covered the spot with a thick layer of thanaka, a traditional plant-based makeup, and continued going to work as normal.

But it was not an ordinary spot. It was the first visible sign of leprosy , a largely forgotten bacterial infection that affects tens of thousands of people every year, mostly in southeast Asia and most of them extremely poor. An ancient disease , leprosy causes skin lesions and nerve damage and can lead to severe disfigurement and disability.

Though curable and not highly contagious, the disease has long carried an intense social stigma, one that used to relegate people with leprosy to the fringes of Myanmar society. Modern treatment has erased some of this stigma, but even those who are cured shoulder a heavy emotional burden.