All About Armadillos - Page 4
Here is page four of our article all about that loveable ugly underdog, the armadillo.
Luckily for us, most westerners think of leprosy as a disease that burdened man in biblical times. Regrettably, leprosy is still afflicting millions of people today in developing countries around the world.
Eleanor Storrs, in her article The Astonishing Armadillo, explains that the agent that causes leprosy was discovered over a hundred years ago, but it was difficult to study this agent because it couldn't be grown in a test tube. Thus research on controlling leprosy fell behind advancements on other diseases.
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Unfortunately for them, armadillos are susceptible to fatal forms of leprosy, probably because they have a lower body temperature than humans. Armadillos don't get human forms of leprosy and as of the writing of Eleanor's article (published in National Geographic June 1982) Florida armadillos did not seem to have the disease.
Joshua Nixon's Armadillo Online tells us that the only times leprosy has been passed from armadillos to humans were in a few cases where somebody ate undercooked armadillo meat.
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The fact that armadillos routinely have 4 identical babies has allowed researchers to do studies that show a susceptibility to leprosy is inherited.
Lepromin is a substance that is used as a diagnostic tool by doctors to predict the course of a leprosy infection in an individual human.
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While this substance used to be rare, now it's known that even one seriously infected armadillo can produce enough lepromin for all the human cases in the world.
That's amazing, isn't it?
Apparently this new abundant source of lepromin has greatly accelerated research into a leprosy vaccine.
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All About Armadillos - Page 4
Here is page four of our article all about that loveable ugly underdog, the armadillo.
All About Armadillos - Page 3
Here is page three of our article all about that loveable ugly underdog, the armadillo.
All About Armadillos - Page 2
Here is page two of our article all about that loveable ugly underdog, the armadillo.
All About Armadillos - Page 1
Here is page one of our article all about that loveable ugly underdog, the armadillo.
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