Books Bygone

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Armadillos: Wow. 'Nuff Said

Several years ago, an 81-year-old woman with a raised patch of dry skin on her arm visited Mississippi dermatologist John Abide, M.D.

Although the lesion looked only slightly abnormal, a series of lab tests revealed that it was a symptom of leprosy.


"I thought, 'Leprosy, are you kidding me?'" says Abide, whose practice is in Greenville. His surprise was understandable.


Each year only about 150 people in the U.S. are infected with leprosy, a bacterial disease that can lead to nerve damage and disfigurement. In most cases, people are infected after being exposed to saliva from an infected person, usually while traveling to parts of the world, such as Africa and Asia, where the disease is more prevalent.


But Abide's patient didn't fit this description.

A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine may provide an explanation for her case: armadillos. The leathery shelled mammals, which can be found in 10 states throughout the Southeastern U.S., are the only animals besides humans known to carry leprosy.


There have been several anecdotal reports of leprosy in humans who have handled, killed or eaten armadillos, or who may have been indirectly exposed by gardening in soil where the animals burrow, as was the case for Abide's patient.

From an article dated April 2011 at CNN dot com. The article goes on to site a study that compared the genome of the leprosy causing bacteria in humans and armadillos. Same. I didn't look at the actual study-- something I normally do so I can read the Methods section. I wouldn't care if their methods were flawed. 

I don't want these nasty critters to be any where near my gardens.

4 comments:

  1. Now I want to shoot the dead ones too!

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    Replies
    1. Seriously. If there is a next time, it ain't gonna involve a .22.

      Delete
  2. Fair enough. I've never heard of the armadillo being aggressive - but this is a case of "involuntary" aggression, I guess.

    I'm still "feeding" poison to whatever is eating it - and the watermelon and other melon plants we put in. Something is consuming both. Something else is digging under the cement wash rack that had previously (at least I _hope_ previously) provided protection for the ground squirrels which we thought were the melon consumers. Dog or coyote? I suspect coyote, but I'm not sure.

    I had to move my tomato plants (extras - I bought too many. I haven't reached the point of successfully raising them from seed) before the gourd someone planted totally overgrew them. Wasn't there some fairy tale where a plant grew up a castle wall so the prince could rescue the princess? I think it was one of these...and whatever is eating the melons apparently hasn't touched these. There are also some cukes - I think - that are being totally ignored. They only eat the good stuff, right? But the puzzling thing is that the poison keeps disappearing. _Something_ is eating it.

    Someone suggested rabbits might be eating the plants. Could be - we have plenty, and they can't get the poison I think. The entry PVC pipe is about 3 inches in diameter, but it's almost two feet into the central point where the poison is. Maybe I need to scatter some of the poison around the base of the remaining melons. Hmmmm. What might eat it that shouldn't?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nasty, brutish & something, right?

      If you want to go bad ass, you have to be really cold hearted. Capsasin. Any hot pepper thing will do it. Seems to work well in a rotation that includes wolf urine.

      Anecdotally, the down side of using hot peppers is that sometimes the critters pick their eyes out.

      Nasty.

      Delete

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