What’s the News: Please back away from the armadillo, ma’am. You can watch them from a distance, even take pictures, but don’t play with or eat Texas’s state mammal: scientists have just confirmed that it is a source of leprosy infections in humans.

How the Heck:

About 150–250 cases of leprosy, which is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae and results in nerve damage if not treated early, are diagnosed in the US each year. Two-thirds of the patients turned out to have contracted the disease abroad in places like Africa, the Philippines, and Brazil, where it’s not uncommon. But a third of the patients had never traveled to locales with a history of leprosy. Many of them lived in the southern U.S., where armadillos roam and are occasionally eaten for meat.
Armadillos are known to carry leprosy—in fact, they are the only wild animals other than humans upon which the picky M. leprae can stand to live—and scientists suspected that these anomalous cases were due to contact with the little armored tootsie rolls. But it was hard to prove as long as both humans and armadillos were carrying fairly generic, readily available strains of ...