TL;DR
Leprosy — formally Hansen’s disease — is quietly climbing in Florida, and state health investigators are chasing a likely culprit: the nine-banded armadillo. Though the disease remains rare nationally, Florida’s concentrated case cluster has made it a public-health priority, and residents in central counties are being urged to understand how transmission actually happens.
What Happened
Florida’s Department of Health has opened a focused epidemiological push to pinpoint the source of an uptick in leprosy cases concentrated in the state’s central corridor — a hotspot that health officials and researchers alike have tied to the region’s dense population of nine-banded armadillos. USA Today reported Wednesday that the state is working to trace new diagnoses and close gaps in surveillance, a task complicated by the disease’s extraordinarily long incubation period.
Leprosy has infected humans for more than 4,000 years — it is referenced in the biblical Book of Leviticus — but in the United States it has long been considered a disease of travelers, imported from endemic regions in Asia, Africa, and South America. That assumption is now being tested in Florida, where a growing number of patients report no international travel and no known contact with other infected people. The common denominator, researchers believe, is the armadillo — the only wild animal in North America known to carry Mycobacterium leprae, the bacterium that causes the disease
