7 ms·
Cat Parasite Affects Everything We Feel and Do
- zeynel1 17y agoObviously there is a limit how much cats will take being humiliated as bad spellers all around the internet by humans. Revenge is here.
- henning 17y agoThe cheezburgers are just an elaborate ruse.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- ajju 17y agoI thought this might be bull so I googled it. Apparently the fact that these parasites affect human behavior is proven! How widespread this is is up for discussion. http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol9no11/03-0143.htm http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol9no11/03-0143.htm
- albemuth 17y agoI'm having a hard time thinking this is not a joke myself
- twir 17y agoObligatory: http://xkcd.com/231/ http://xkcd.com/231/
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- erlanger 17y agoThis parasite is indeed real and widespread, and the reason you don't notice its effects in others is because its effects are rather minor, resulting from small brain infections and increased dopamine at certain sites (I had no luck pinpointing the location of these, unfortunately). The most agreed-upon effect appears to be that the parasite results in decreased neophilia. What a sensationalist story like this one will not tell you is that the observed effects are "rather low": Our results showed that CMV infected subjects had lower scores in the personality dimension novelty seeking than the CMV-free subjects. Novelty seeking in infected subjects negatively correlated with levels of anti-CMV antibodies. Negative correlation was also found between novelty seeking and Toxoplasma-infection in Prague, while in villages and smaller cities the correlation was not significant. The effect of both infections, although highly significant, was rather low, explaining about 2 % of total variability of the novelty seeking in our experimental set. http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2334/5/54 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2334/5/54 Further, while cats are this parasite's original host, it seems that you're as likely to become infected form undercooked meat as from water polluted with cat fecal matter. I guess that's not as much fun as saying "cats are bad, now everyone fight!" I love how every media outlet picked this up as soon ('06, granted) as possible but it took Reuters a month to report on conclusive findings that marijuana consumption results in lower incidence of head and neck cancer.
- biohacker42 17y agoThis is old news and fluff. For a less fluffy article: Increased incidence of traffic accidents in Toxoplasma-infected military drivers and protective effect RhD molecule revealed by a large-scale prospective cohort study. Look here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2334/9/72 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2334/9/72 Courtesy of the hard science sub-reddit. For those with too little time to read the actual paper, here's the results summary: We confirmed, using for the first time a prospective cohort study design, increased risk of traffic accidents in Toxoplasma-infected subjects and demonstrated a strong protective effect of RhD positivity against the risk of traffic accidents posed by latent toxoplasmosis. Our results show that RhD-negative subjects with high titers of anti-Toxoplasma antibodies had a probability of a traffic accident of about 16.7%, i.e. a more than six times higher rate than Toxoplasma-free or RhD-positive subjects.
- erlanger 17y agoIn case I missed it, did that study control for location? I know that the other study stated that it did not have much (if any) background information on the candidates, but did say that infection rates for the parasite are higher in villages and small towns. I think that this is a significant lurking variable in any traffic accident analysis, and needs to be considered: In my experience, rural folk are less exposed to some of the more "creative" driving situations than those who live closer in.
- biohacker42 17y agoGood catch! I don't think they controlled for location.
- 10ren 17y agoSo, the cat killed curiosity?
- igorhvr 17y agoHow do I know whether I am infected or not?
- swombat 17y agoCome on. This is not HN material. What's next? Lolcats?
- coconutrandom 17y agosadly, yes.
- coconutrandom 17y agohappily yes?
- coconutrandom 17y agohahahahaah! indifferently, yes?
- gojomo 17y agoI find new discoveries about incurable diseases which change human personalities on the scale of individuals and whole societies very HN-worthy, by the same standard as other science/medical discoveries. Unfortunately, this is (1) old news; and (2) especially prone to obvious, knee-jerk LOLcats jokes -- there were already three before your comment. So I have mixed feelings about its topicality.
- timr 17y agoSome of us made LOLcat jokes because the story is old news. Maybe they weren't funny to you -- if so, mea culpa. The danger of demonizing bad jokes is that eventually, nobody will make any jokes at all; they can't all be funny. Then we're just a bunch of annoyingly high-strung geeks being Very Serious about matters which have absolutely no relevance.
- biohacker42 17y agoI've never seen the danger of no jokes come to life. The other danger, that we end up as mostly one liners, is reality for both slashdot and reddit.
- fnid 17y agoThere's another instance of this where flukes infect ants making them want to climb blades of grass where they are eaten by cows. Here's a diagram of the lifecycle of this odd creature: http://workforce.cup.edu/Buckelew/dicrocoelium_dendriticum_is_a_bi.htm http://workforce.cup.edu/Buckelew/dicrocoelium_dendriticum_i...
- jerf 17y agoA sci-fi story that springboards off of this parasite and its effects, which should appeal to some hacker types: http://www.davidwgoldman.com/Invasion_of_the_Pattern_Snatchers.html http://www.davidwgoldman.com/Invasion_of_the_Pattern_Snatche...
- rbanffy 17y agoA really good one! Thanks for the pointer!
- yannis 17y ago'Research has shown that women who are infected with the parasite tend to be warm, outgoing and attentive to others, while infected men tend to be less intelligent and probably a bit boring. But both men and women who are infected are more prone to feeling guilty and insecure.' Although I do not doubt the infection rates I am sceptical about the conclusions. Any woman that does not LOVE cats is obviously not warm and attentive of others and I would like to see more details on the men samples; for example were they married to the above ladies or not. Do guilty and insecure people tend to have cats as pets? Anyway I love cats since I was a kid and I am male! Worth the infection if I have it and perhaps the reason that so far I have not catch AIDS!
- jrockway 17y agoAnyway I love cats since I was a kid and I am male! Worth the infection if I have it and perhaps the reason that so far I have not catch AIDS! I like cats too, but I feel like I am missing something here. How did you get from "I love cats" to not getting AIDS?
- DavidSJ 17y agoI think the idea is he loves cats, not women.
- thesecret 17y agoThat's why pregnant women are told to stay away from cats during term
- pyre 17y agoNot cats, but cat feces. (i.e. she shouldn't be changing her cat's -- or cats' -- litter box)
- dylanz 17y agoMy friend who's a 24 year old (extremely cute) female, who eats your Standard American Diet (but on the healthy side), took a 40 day juice fast about a year ago. After about day 30, she passed a huge ball of worms in her stool. Let me emphasize "huge". Like, a babies fist. Needless to say, she had some parasites. I now fear the juice fast... and, in a weird way... her :)
- delackner 17y agoCuriosity and revulsion combine. What exactly about an all juice food regimen would kill off that ball of parasites?
- bhousel 17y agoYeah, ditto on the curiosity and revulsion. Is this a normal occurrence when juice fasting? What kind of juice? And when it was all over, any after-effects?