A Surprise Culprit Is Helping to Spread the Cat Poop Parasite
If you’re a cat owner, then you’ve probably heard there’s a good chance your feline is a living host to Toxoplasma gondii, a potentially lethal parasite able to infect many kinds of warm-blooded animals. Unfortunately, that includes humans. When infected by the parasite, people can be struck by toxoplasmosis. At its mildest, the disease causes flu-like symptoms, and it’s rare for people with strong immune systems to feel more than muscle aches, fever, fatigue, and a headache.
But sometimes, toxoplasmosis can cause worse problems, like seizures and other neurological issues. At its worst stages, it can result in death. That’s not exactly what you’d like to hear is a side effect of having a cat, which can play host to the parasite during a stage of its life cycle when it is an oocyst (a tissue cyst). Cats shed these oocysts through their feces, after which they can spread to other hosts and move forward with their life cycle, potentially inducing toxoplasmosis through infection.
So far, our understanding of the parasite is mostly focused on the domestic cat populations. But wild, stray, and feral cats are capable of shedding the parasite as well. It turns out the presence of humans are helping to drive forward T. gondii rates in these populations. A new study run by University of California, Davis scientists found that wild and feral cats shed more of the parasite in areas that are increasingly populated by people—underscoring the ways in which rising human populations are helping to exacerbate the spread of this deadline pathogen.