The Future Holds: Less armadillo on the menu, for starters.

There’s been armadillo on the menu *before* this?

Not in any restaurant I’ve been in.

As I recall it, back in the late ’50′s or early ’60′s, a medical researcher in Louisiana theorized that armadillos might be able to contract leprosy because of their lower body temperature, which would give medicine a “guinea pig” for a disease guinea pigs (and lab rats) can’t catch. His team tested this and sure enough, in a few years the test armadillos began to show leprosy lesions. (Because they’re not as long lived, they don’t have time to develop the more horrific results of the disease that an untreated human can expect over decades.)

THEN, leprosy was found in wild armadillos in Louisiana, and the original scientist was accused of allowing the disease to escape the lab into the wild. That theory collapsed however, when infected armadillos were found in a far wider distribution than could be explained by an escape from a lab a decade prior. (If my memory serves, the infection was found even on Caribbean islands – maybe Cuba.)

At this point, the accepted theory became that armadillo populations were first exposed to leprosy centuries earlier, (probably from the slave trade). This theory has since been bolstered by genetic testing of armadillos’ leprosy viruses.