The majority of U.S. leprosy cases are the result of travel to far-away locales, but scientists also have identified a homegrown transmitter: the armadillo.
Nearly one-third of the 150 to 250 annual U.S. cases of leprosy appear to be the result of contact with armadillos, the bumpy-looking creatures found in the American south and west. The cases are concentrated in Texas and Louisiana, where armadillos sometimes are hunted, as The New York Times reports.
Scientists had long suspected the link, but the most recent research, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, confirmed it. The researchers took skin biopsies at a Baton Rouge, La., clinic from 50 patients with leprosy, most of whom had not traveled abroad. Twenty-five of those patients were determined to have a strain of leprosy found in armadillos and different from the versions of the disease contracted abroad.
Experts said contact with the animals has to be quite extensive to transmit leprosy; frequent contact or eating armadillo meat is required. “I would not cuddle armadillos,” Dr. Warwick Britton of the University of Sydney, who had no connection with the study, told the Associated Press.
Leprosy, an ancient affliction also known as Hansen’s disease, starts to manifest itself with lumpy lesions in the skin. If it goes untreated, the disease can cause nerve damage in the fingers and toes, which can lead to permanent loss of feeling.
It can be treated successfully with a regimen of antibiotics over one to two years. However, leprosy is often hard to detect, because the disease can remain dormant in a carrier for many years.
Overseas, it is a far bigger threat, with about 250,000 cases every year. Leprosy is most commonly contracted in such places as India, Brazil, Angola, the Philippines and other Western Pacific islands.
The latest evidence seems to show that the disease has been transmitted from animals to humans, as well as from humans to animals. Leprosy didn’t exist in the New World before Christopher Columbus, and armadillos are indigenous only to the New World. “So armadillos had to have acquired it from humans sometime in the last 400 to 500 years,” Dr. Richard W. Truman, a researcher at the National Hansen’s Disease Program in Baton Rouge and an author of the study, told the Times.
This is fascinating! Thanks for always bringing such interesting news to my attention.