Leprosy is Bad, M'Kay?

The New York Times today reports on a study showing that a small number of humans in the US probably contract leprosy every year from contact with armadillos. This is absolutely something that locavore and invasivore hunters should be aware of. We tend to eat things that most people don't and need to stay on top of wildlife issues like this.

However, I don't think that this study really changes anything. The fact that armadillos near the Gulf of Mexico carry leprosy has been well-known and studied for decades. It is nice to have some figures about transmission to humans, but informed hunters in Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi should have been avoiding contact with armadillos in the first place.

The bacteria that cause leprosy do not survive for long outside of a host. Among humans the disease is normally transmitted through exhaled droplets in the air during close contact with other humans. Armadillos are not particularly social animals, so transmission tends to take place through bacteria on the soil at the entrances to burrows. Soil conditions near the Gulf of Mexico happen to allow the bacteria to survive long enough for regular transmission.

Farther away from the Gulf, it just isn't really much of an issue. Eating armadillos in Georgia, the Carolinas or in Colrado poses no risk presently of contracting leprosy. Good data on this is available from the Journal of Wildlife Diseases. There have been a very few cases of leprosy found farther away from the Gulf, but these instances are probably individuals that originated close to the Gulf and later dispersed a long way inland. Transmission from those relocated individuals to other armadillos probably isn't happening, but the situation needs to be monitored and studied regularly to be certain.

Personally, I will have no qualms about eating armadillos from the mid-Atlantic US for the next few years. Just in case, I'll continue to wear latex gloves while butchering them and I will cook the meat thoroughly. And if I was to somehow contract leprosy, I'd take a course of free antibiotics and that would be that. Worrying right now about a disease among armadillos in North Carolina because of cases over 600 miles away just doesn't make any sense. In ten or twenty years, maybe we could have a problem. For now its not going to stop me from eating them in the right places.

[Photo used courtesy of Lauren Mitchell under Creative Commons License 2.0]