Cat parasite linked to mental illness, schizophrenia | Hacker News Reader

Cat parasite linked to mental illness, schizophrenia

cbsnews.com

19 pointsRadixDLT13 comments

A risk I’m willing to take for a lifetime of love, companionship and observing their infinite curiosity. (Definitely not written by an infected toxoplasmosis human)

It's crazy that this is so widespread, has brain disease implications, and yet there is no treatment for the hundreds of millions of people worldwide currently infected.

What is likely worse is that they can only document the worst cases, and cannot measure the subtler impacts on seemingly healthy infected people.

Maybe this is a major cause of ADD, or depression, or dyslexia, or autism, etc... we haven't done the research, so we aren't even bothering to test or treat a clearly extremely common infection. Its stupid.

Uh, neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD and autism are not something that happens later in life from an infection, it's something people are born with, and it's almost certainly down to genes; do some reading on MTHFR. Your comment is alarmist nonsense that isn't much better than "vaccines cause autism".

>The CDC also recommends changing the cat's litter box daily

Yeah, I'll get right on that. Sheesh, the risk-sensitivity of the modern medical profession is a bit ridiculous, sometimes.

Edit: I'm interpreting this as "throw out all the litter and replace it with fresh litter", which anyone who owns a cat will surely agree is insanity.

+1. That would be insanity and needless. Most people are exposed to more things like this, outside the home.

Not to mention that eating undercooked meat is a bigger infection risk than living with a pet cat, especially an indoor-only cat.

Self-cleaning litter boxes all the way. House smells better, cat smells better, less misery for you.

If you can afford it, it is a must have.

A more recent surveying diseases which T.gondii is implicated in:

https://twitter.com/GC_Milne/status/1457831246344691718

It also has a case where curing a female from t.gondii(right after she got it) cured her depression.

They keep repeating that since years, but we are still waiting for the proofs

> Results showed that an individual infected with T. gondii was almost twice as likely to develop schizophrenia

T. gondii came for you. Please, start to panic and howl right now while running to buy my product.

Lets talk about p-hacking:

About 50% of the population had Toxoplasma gondii at some point in their lives

0.35% of the population are schizophrenic.

If Toxoplasma gondii really causes schizophrenia the correlation effect is not really strong or consistent. Without T. gondii "would be" 0.17%.

As the huge majority of the people that suffered T. gondii infection never develops schizophrenia we could also safely conclude that having cat pets PROTECTS against schizophrenia.

No...using same argument, you would also safely conclude that smoking protects against lung cancer.

Exact. We could say it and it would be also wrong and silly.

Because correlation is not causation necessarily, and a third actor (ehum... alcohol, drugs) could be creating that increase in mental illness.

How many people that "does not have a pet cat" is schizophrenic?

There is a vaccine for toxoplasmosis, but is only available in New Zealand & Australia for sheep. Toxoplasmosis infection in sheep causes pregnant sheep to miscarry (aka "spontaneous abortions").

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