Animals

What can cause schizophrenia, depression, and skin lesions, and makes you like cats? Believe it or not, a parasite carried by cats can actually turn you into a cat person!

You may be familiar with toxoplasmosis as the reason why pregnant women and HIV-positive people ar exempted from litter box scooping duty.

Toxoplasmosis is also why most cities have banned flushable clumping cat litter, because it is a serious danger to marine mammals like seals and otters. Toxoplasmosis is caused by a protozoan named Toxoplasma gondii, a microscopic parasite which has wide-ranging effects on its host body.

The symptoms of a toxoplasmosis infection are, for most of us, extremely subtle. The acute phase typically presents like a low-grade cold or flu (including fatigue and swollen glands) which lasts about a month. After that, the infection goes into the latent phase, when no normal symptoms are observed.