Although I have seen many cases of leprosy overseas, I do remember a case of leprosy I saw in Texas, while in training at Baylor...
uvealblues
Using genetic sequencing machines, researchers were able to confirm that about a third of the leprosy cases that arise each year in the United States almost certainly result from contact with infected armadillos. The cases are concentrated in Louisiana and Texas, where some people hunt, skin and eat armadillos.
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Leprosy now joins a host of other infectious diseases — including flu, H.I.V./AIDS and SARS — that are known to have jumped from animals to humans. Flu is thought to have first crossed to humans from migratory waterfowl several hundred years ago. H.I.V./AIDS first crossed from a chimpanzee about 90 years ago.Dr. Fauci said that about 70 percent of new emerging infectious diseases were known to have animal origins.But one of the interesting aspects of leprosy is that transmission seems to have gone in both directions. Leprosy was not present 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,” said Dr. Richard W. Truman, a researcher at the National Hansen’s Disease Program in Baton Rouge, La., and an author of the armadillo study, which was published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
uvealblues
Using genetic sequencing machines, researchers were able to confirm that about a third of the leprosy cases that arise each year in the United States almost certainly result from contact with infected armadillos. The cases are concentrated in Louisiana and Texas, where some people hunt, skin and eat armadillos.
(..)
Leprosy now joins a host of other infectious diseases — including flu, H.I.V./AIDS and SARS — that are known to have jumped from animals to humans. Flu is thought to have first crossed to humans from migratory waterfowl several hundred years ago. H.I.V./AIDS first crossed from a chimpanzee about 90 years ago.
Dr. Fauci said that about 70 percent of new emerging infectious diseases were known to have animal origins.
But one of the interesting aspects of leprosy is that transmission seems to have gone in both directions. Leprosy was not present 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,” said Dr. Richard W. Truman, a researcher at the National Hansen’s Disease Program in Baton Rouge, La., and an author of the armadillo study, which was published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
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