Our friend Ann was discussing all the armadillos she trapped last year at her farm in Missouri, and this got me thinking about these unusual critters. We've all heard that armadillos can be vectors for Hansen's disease -- leprosy -- but transmission is rare. In fact, 95 percent of human adults are immune to leprosy.
But I happened to run across this item on the CDC site, and tomorrow is the fourth Sunday in January -- and the 70th annual World Leprosy Day. Can't hurt to pause a moment and think of those who do have it -- and of the terror it brought in earlier times.

https://www.cdc.gov/leprosy/wo...prosy-day/index.html

P.S. Armadillo meat is supposed to be like fine-grained pork!

They were called Depression chickens decades ago….

No. This is not food.

On the serious side, there were genuine saints who ministered to those afflicted with the dread disease, mentioned more than three dozen times in the Bible.

https://www.nps.gov/kala/learn...ryculture/damien.htm

Possum on the half shell

I had one for a pet when I was a kid. They are totally nocturnal. About the time I was going to bed it was getting up and banging around. It drove the neighbors crazy.
C.G.B.

C.G, I'll bet you were envy of all your friends. Did your dillo enjoy a tummy rub?

Not really. The silly beast was like a little excavator. Turn it loose in the garden and in would bury its snout in the ground and start tractoring. When it found a worm it would stop, and suck it up, then move on. It liked to dig endless tunnels. It finally escaped one night by tunneling out of its enclosure. We never found the outlet.
C.G.B.

When I lived in Texas, I heard them called Hoover hogs, named after the depression president, Herbert Hoover.

To quote someone...
Everything is food if you are hungry enough.

In ROTC we had a survival class. We ate a lot of things that most won't. Worms, insects, Coon, rat.

One thing that I remember out of it was that if you cooked it very well done it would not make you sick... that was talking re roadkill. Cut the rotted stuff off, cook the hell out of it and gulp it down. It wouldn't taste too good, but you could live off of it.

Since then in medicine prion diseases seem to be the exception to that.

quote:

Originally posted by crbutler:
To quote someone...
Everything is food if you are hungry enough.

In ROTC we had a survival class. We ate a lot of things that most won't. Worms, insects, Coon, rat.

One thing that I remember out of it was that if you cooked it very well done it would not make you sick... that was talking re roadkill. Cut the rotted stuff off, cook the hell out of it and gulp it down. It wouldn't taste too good, but you could live off of it.

Since then in medicine prion diseases seem to be the exception to that.

Is there any idea, proven, where prion diseases originated from? They seem rather recent.

Ann, it would seem still a mystery.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/heal...-disease/ar-BB1hBP82

A form of it has been around in humans for a long time:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creutzfeldt%E2%80%93Jakob_disease
What is so scary about the disease is that it is not a living organism but rather a mutated molecule. Once in the system it causes cells to reproduce the molecule before the animal dies. No vaccination or drugs to treat it. Why do I think there are bio-labs in really bad places trying to weaponize this?
C.G.B.

Let's not give anyone any ideas.