Nine-banded armadillos believed to have caused LEPROSY in Florida patients

UK DailyMail ^ | 28 February 2015 | Christopher Brennan

[LucyT]

Three people have been diagnosed with leprosy in Florida and some of the cases are thought to be linked to armadillos.

Health officials in Volusia County said that the cases are not related, though two of those who have been diagnosed with Hansen’s disease, or leprosy, since October had been in contact with nine-banded armadillos.

[exDemMom]

When I was an undergraduate the only place you could culture the thing was, yes, armadillo foot pads.

I thought they were cultured in mouse foot pads.

In any case, it is a fairly cruel way to have to culture a bug, since it causes pain to an animal.

I'm trying to remember--is the mycobacterium leprae an obligate intracellular parasite? I think it is. It's been a while since I took a bacterial pathogenesis class.

[Rebelbase]

“The incubation period for the disease can run up to 10 years,”

It’s been 40 years since I dined on armadillo. Whew!

[Rebelbase]

“We’re gonna need a bigger spear”.

[null and void]

Mice have too high a body temperature.

Leprosy fails to thrive at normal mammal body temperatures, that’s why in people it’s the cold appendages that are infected.

Armadillos are “blessed” with low body temperature...

[Freedom56v2]

Wow, I had no idea they would be found that far north!

[Myrddin]

It looks like pistachio pudding. You really need the selective media since Mycobacteria grow very slowly compared to other organisms. The added items keep others organisms at bay.

[Myrddin]

The media supplier recommends a CO2 atmosphere with 35-37C temperatures. Tube caps open for the first 5 days, then seal tight to prevent media dehydration. Protect from light during incubation. In vivo, they prefer to be intracellular. That makes them hard to treat.

A research at this link has had success stimulating the M. leprae organism with thyroxine containing Dubos medium prior to culture on a Lowenstein-Jensen slant. Incubation time is 8 to 16 WEEKS.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[Smokin' Joe]

You’re welcome, Alamo-Girl!

[BerryDingle]

Back in the early to mid 80’s, hundreds of dead dillos could be spotted along I-95 and I-75, they suddenly died out and my son told about a year ago he saw one dead, which is 35 years later.

[exDemMom]

Incubation time is 8 to 16 WEEKS.

And I thought it was tedious growing Leptospira, which had to be cultured for days!

Yeast in selective media could take days to weeks to grow, too.

I've never tried culturing anything that took several weeks to grow. It would be very disheartening if a culture failed.

[Myrddin]

I love the field of bacteriology, but this kind of waiting on an indeterminate result pushed me into the world of computer science. The bugs are different, but more controllable. The waits for proteins to crystallize to allow structural analysis by x-ray crystallography spawned software modeling of protein folding. Computational biology is the synthesis of both disciplines.

[exDemMom]

I’m a biochemist, so have only grown a few species of bugs. I always call E. coli the workhorse of the lab, since they grow fairly quickly.

The software modelling comes in handy when you are dealing with proteins that are too unstable or cannot be expressed in high enough quantity to crystallize. Some proteins do not crystallize. Back in grad school, during one of our lessons on protein structure analysis, the professor told us how he would spend weeks entering the characteristics of a protein into a code, which he would then take to UCLA and, for $16,000/hr computation time (20 years ago), he could feed the code into a CRAY and get some modelling results. He had to be very careful about the programming; at that price, he did not want a buggy or incorrect code. For all that money, the output was a 3D line diagram of a protein vibrating between its possible conformations, lasting a few seconds.

[Myrddin]

Very expensive computing time. My co-workers were doing lots of nuclear calculations on a Cray at Los Alamos. I discovered most of their code wasn't really vectorizing, so the Cray wasn't helping. The HP PA-RISC workstation running HP-UX ran the calculations just as fast and more conveniently.

When I still lived in San Diego, one of my nearby neighbors was in the process of creating a company to do the protein modeling you described. That was in the very early 90's. It appears he succeeded and left the immediate area to tend to his new company. It certainly makes more sense to model that way.

I agree with E. coli being the workhorse in the lab. The EcoR1 mutant (no restriction enzymes) was a big step forward. That was barely available when I graduated in 1976.