Aid from the Armadillo

Three years ago, researchers at the Gulf South Research Institute in New Iberia, La., found that the strange, tanklike armadillos common to the Southwest were the only animals that shared man's natural susceptibility to leprosy. Now a team of scientists from Gulf, the University of Hawaii and the Republic of Zaire's Institut Medical Evangelique report that this chance discovery has paid off. The researchers report that a single nine-banded armadillo that died recently at Gulf yielded some 300 trillion leprosy bacilli--good news for medical researchers who have been searching for ways to cultivate the bacteria for laboratory studies. Doctors will also be able to use the infected tissue to make a diagnostic reagent called lepromin, which is used to predict the severity of a leprosy patient's disease. The single New Iberia animal has yielded enough of the chemical to perform 15 million tests--about as many as there are leprosy patients in the world.

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