The Tease of Things I Don't Need

Give the Martians some cats?

I happened on a piece concerning a potentially personality-altering parasite and humans being at risk from it via a larger, furrier parasite - the housecat. The piece - from September of 2003 - reads almost whimsically, talking about the single-celled parasite Toxoplasma gondii, presumably because in a healthy individual it's not an immediate and obvious health threat. The thrust of the piece, with its attempt to associate the behaviors with feline personality traits, is fluffy, pop-junk science, but the biological connection caught my attention. This is one of the countless microscopic creepy crawlies that are in our environment, and once one reads between the lines it appears that the message is that it's likely so common among cat owners and perhaps even the general population that the healthcare community has narrowed its vision to be concerned only about infected people who are pregnant (as this can cause spontaneous abortions or mental and physical handicaps in the offspring) or have compromised immune system, and so would develop a severe form of the infection, which seems to be another way of saying their development becomes rampant.

Beyond that they literature is sufficiently vague when it comes to treatment that it supports the closing line in the article referenced at the start of this piece, from Dr. Dominque Soldati, a researcher at the Imperial College of London:

“Once you are infected you cannot get rid of this parasite and the numbers of them slowly grow over the years,” she said. “It’s not a nice thought.”

The impression I get is that there isn't much that can be done to get rid of the organisms once one's infected, and so at least joins all of those many viruses we never get rid of. Each time I find out about another of these parasitic hangers-on it seems less surprising the next time I see someone (particularly the elderly) drop suddenly from vigor to a dilapidation. Cumulatively, it all has echoes of King's Captain Tripps.

With another attempt at Wells' War of the Worlds due to sweep across movie screens in a few weeks all of this seemed to fit... though what portions of the original Spielberg and Cruise have left intact in their version, who knows? The setting and time are obviously and understandably altered, and it's been turned into a tale of a self-absorbed man (Cruise) coming to defend his family, so so far all I can tell is that they at least remembered that it's about an alien invasion... Well, hey. It may be fun trying to see what shreds, if any, of the original novel survive. Despite Spielberg's claiming to have reread the novel immediately before deciding to do it, my experience has been that most people who believe they're familiar with the book really only know the 1953 movie version.

I have three cats, by the way, and have always liked them, so this isn't a cat-bashing piece. From the look of things people should be safe if they exercise reaonable hygiene and don't prepare food on surfaces cats have been sitting on or otherwise bring any of the things their cats bring home into the kitchen.