Cats have become the favorite virtual pastime for many of us. We fall in love with them while watching cute videos with cats making grimaces, reacting in funny ways and doing foolish but cute things. Or being highly and overwhelmingly intelligent and fascinating just by being themselves. Nowadays, everybody loves cats and some of us even took our chances to have one as a pet and see how it goes.
A recent study shows that coming into close contact with cats is quite dangerous. Cats carry a parasite known under the name of Toxoplasma gondii, or under the popular name of cat poop parasite. This nasty one is linked to schizophrenia and other mental disorders that can seriously affect humans.
So if you love cats and know of yourself to be a little bit mentally unstable, as I guess all of us are, in this fast moving, fast consuming, fast spreading, sharing and uncaring world, think twice because your mental health problems may get worse.
The toxoplasma gondii parasite is most common in highly civilized and developed countries and is prone to infect any warm blooded species, as the Schizophrenia Bulleting recently noted. Going further with the news bulletin, this bacteria can cause the illness known under the name of T gondii, which is linked to weeks of symptoms that are highly resembling to flu, can cause blindness or even death. Apparently, most humans don’t exactly suffer from any clear symptoms from the widespread parasite.
Toxoplasma gondii is also the main cause of toxoplasmosis, as most of us already know. Toxoplasmosis seems to be a leading cause of death, linked to foodborne illnesses in the US. In the States, most common source of infection with this disease that can also be caused by undercooked contaminated meat, is the contact with feces of infected cats.
Presently there are over 100 million cats in the US, with each one of them presenting the risk of carrying the gruesome parasite. Moreover, children that grow up near cats develop a greater chance of psychiatric illnesses, with schizophrenia in particular. Consequently, people infected with the parasite are twice as likely to have schizophrenia as well.
More than 20% of the population in the US, or more consistently, 60 million people are thought to be carriers of this parasite coming from infected cat feces. In the case of schizophrenia diagnosis, a past research revealed strong connection between owning a cat during childhood and developing a mental disorder.
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