I have no idea,but you have to be careful with eating snails. They contain a nasty parasite that can kill you.

Well, actually KOICA(an agency I belong to now) office advises against eating them(or any other food items sold by street vendors), after an incident where a Peace Corps volunteer died from food poisoning after eating a bowl of snails.
With that, I don't really have any intention of eating them, but still, whenever I pass by one of those snail vendors, I can't but notice that they smell tasty, with heavy aroma of thyme.

I saw on a thousand ways to die a couple tried eating snails and both died....

http://www.furaffinity.net/full/9704129/

how does a snail crawl up a palm leaf?

very slowly...

this specimen looks a lot like those we have in all of europe. especially the french like to eat them. I don't know about parasites, but in those areas street vendor food tends to be vastly undercooked, which possibly cause the aforementioned dangers.

the middle european wild snails often are full of lead, back from the days when our gasoline was enhanced with lead tetra ethyle, which apparently collected in snails. a couple years ago some german rock band singer played around with a shell-less snail and accidentally swallowed it. a few days later he was hospitalized with lead posinoning...
our gasoline no longer contains lead since some years, but some places are still posinoned by it.

Hmmm.... I think Helix aspersa might be it. At least it seems to belong to genus Helix. Thanks!

The lead concentration problem you mentioned reminds me of a problem here; Moroccans have bad habit of throwing their trash everywhere, and in almost every rural areas, you can see huge masses of plastic bags and bottles gathered under cacti, thorny bushes, ditches, and so on. even the plot I recieved from the institute I work for now contains so many plastic bits that I honestly don't want to grow anything in it. I am pretty sure this will bite back hard later, but I have no idea what should be done to solve this.

at your service. :)

habits like these can't be changed just like that. mostly because "it has been done by my father and his father and etc" which is only an excuse to not having to think twice, and change habits. meanwhile they'll discard their trash in the open until one day, the first oasis spring is contaminated beyond repair. of course, the first to suffer will be the nomads and wild animals...

or the nasty habit of discarding unwanted domestic animals somewhere which runs rampant in western, southern and eastern europe (though in middle europe still too many people treat their once-beloved pets like things should they become inconvenient). now they have problems with half-wild dogs and cats running around causing trouble, but nobody stands up and does anything about it.
or people in northern italy hunting wild birds to the brink of extinction, then they turn around and complain about them insects eating up their crop...

you probably can't change these thought patterns until it's too late. as in, they get involved personally and directly. but I wish you that you can make them change their mind eventually. maybe... maybe they'll listen for once.

Glee! Snails!

We have some interesting ones herte on the Western Australian coast. Imported British garden snails - and also several white-shelled local grass snails, and even a carnivorous snail!