The Hump Jones article:
http://humpjones.com/?p=28

Further readings

SEED Magazine article:
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/08/the_cultureshaping_parasite.php?page=all&p=y

In a paper published in the online edition of Proceedings of the Royal Society, United States Geological Survey researcher Kevin Lafferty argues that a significant factor in why some countries exhibit higher levels of neuroticism than others may be the prevalence of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. The study also indicates that it may influence a society’s preference for strict laws, an expression of uncertainty avoidance, and its valuation of ‘masculine’ priorities such as competitiveness and financial success over ‘feminine’ values like relationship-building.

“Toxoplasma appears to explain 30% of the variation in neuroticism among countries, 15% of the uncertainty avoidance among Western nations and 30% of the sex role differences among Western nations,” Lafferty said via e-mail.

Lafferty analyzed preexisting data on Toxoplasma prevalence and mean trait levels in 39 countries. He found a significant linear correlation between latent Toxoplasma prevalence and neuroticism with a few outliers, including the unusually neurotic nations of Hungary and China and the notably easygoing Turkey.

CDC “Factsheet” on Toxoplasma
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dpd/parasites/toxoplasmosis/factsht_toxoplasmosis.htm

We’re missing the obvious. I would like to confront the numbers of infected people and the general percentage of people prefering cats to dogs

NOW THEY’RE KILLING THE WHALES, TOO. WHAT THE FUCK.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/aug/30/3/print

Pet owners who flush cat faeces down the lavatory may be responsible for the deaths of whales, dolphins and porpoises around Britain’s coast, according to academics and public health experts.

They have found evidence of a common parasite in dead marine mammals and say family cats could be be the unwitting source. Cats are essential to the life cycle of toxoplasma gondii, which can infect most mammals and birds but only as part of the food chain.

The possible link to dolphin deaths has been raised by staff from Swansea and Glamorgan universities and the National Public Health Service for Wales in a letter to the Veterinary Record. They say that in California concern that cat faeces have contributed to sea otter deaths has led to disposal warnings on bags of cat litter. But little is known about infection in marine species around Britain.

Blood samples from dead stranded cetaceans revealed infection in one in 70 harbour porpoises, in six of 21 common dolphins and in the only hump-backed whale tested. Nearly one in eight Swansea University and health service employees admitted flushing cat faeces away.

also, http://www.percivale.co.uk/castacontin/viewtopic.php?t=1041

*steps away slowly*

This can be considered to be getting.. worrisome and insane.

I really.. really.. want to pump-shot the cat I find in my backyard every day… either that or we could plant Rue everywhere!

Hmm.

Parasites can, in fact, access your genes:

http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=2963

Bacterial to Animal Gene Transfers Now Shown to be Widespread, with Implications for Evolution and Control of Diseases and Pests

Scientists at the University of Rochester and the J. Craig Venter Institute have discovered a copy of the genome of a bacterial parasite residing inside the genome of its host species.

The research, reported in today’s Science, also shows that lateral gene transfer—the movement of genes between unrelated species—may happen much more frequently between bacteria and multicellular organisms than scientists previously believed, posing dramatic implications for evolution.

Such large-scale heritable gene transfers may allow species to acquire new genes and functions extremely quickly, says Jack Werren, a principal investigator of the study. If such genes provide new abilities in species that cause or transmit disease, they could provide new targets for fighting these diseases.

The results also have serious repercussions for genome-sequencing projects. Bacterial DNA is routinely discarded when scientists are assembling invertebrate genomes, yet these genes may very well be part of the organism’s genome, and might even be responsible for functioning traits.

Quite an abundance of brainfood at the above link, good visuals, too.

Here’s more on parasites that control the behavior of the host:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=lIc7aEL_ERs&feature=related

Shows promise as a treatment:

http://www.physorg.com/news119117864.html

“As a target for drug development, this pathway is very attractive for several reasons,” says author L. David Sibley, Ph.D., professor of molecular microbiology. “For example, because of its many roles in plant biology, we already have several inhibitors for it. Also, the plant-like nature of the target decreases the chances that blocking it with a drug will have significant negative side effects in human patients.”

T. gondii’s relatives include the parasites that cause malaria, which also appear to have genes for ABA synthesis. The new findings may explain an earlier study where a group of researchers found that the same herbicide inhibits malaria.

Infection with T. gondii, or toxoplasmosis, is perhaps most familiar to the general public from the recommendation that pregnant women avoid changing cat litter. Cats are commonly infected with the parasite, as are some livestock and wildlife. Humans can also become infected by eating undercooked meat or by drinking water contaminated with spores shed by cats.

Epidemiologists estimate that as many as one in every four humans is infected with T. gondii. Infections are typically asymptomatic, only causing serious disease in patients with weakened immune systems. In some rare cases, though, infection in patients with healthy immune systems leads to serious eye or central nervous system disease, or congenital defects in the fetuses of pregnant women.

Scientists have known for approximately a decade that protozoan parasites like T. gondii and those that cause malaria contain many plant-like pathways, or groups of genes or proteins put to use for a particular biological task. The common ancestor of these parasites incorporated an algal cell millions of years ago. This endosymbiotic relationship results in the incorporated organism becoming a regular part of the larger organism’s cell structure. The parasites can make use of the algae’s genes, many of which were transferred to the parasite’s nucleus to control processes in a structure that is a remnant of the original algal cells.

That earlier revelation led to ongoing efforts to develop drugs that block plant-like proteins parasites use to synthesize metabolically important structures or compounds. However, until this study, no one had found the parasites using a plant-like protein for signaling purposes.

“Signals are sometimes even better targets for drug development than biosynthetic pathways,” says Sibley. “Taking out a biosynthetic pathway means you take away one thing from the parasite. But if you can successfully disable a key signal, this may potentially disrupt many more aspects of the parasite’s metabolism.”

Kisaburo Nagamune, Ph.D., formerly a postdoctoral fellow in Sibley’s laboratory, found the ABA pathway in T. gondii while searching the parasite’s genome for pathways linked to calcium signalling. Researchers knew that calcium signaling was important to the parasite’s ability to control its complex reproductive cycle, but a search for genes similar to the calcium signaling pathways found in mammalian cells, such as the calcium receptors or channels that are common in heart cells and neurons, found few analogs in T. gondii.

ABA has many prominent roles in plant biology, including regulation of flowering and seed dormancy. A series of experiments led by Nagamune, now an assistant professor at Tsukuba University in Japan, showed that ABA helps the parasites control their reproductive cycle by communicating with each other in the host cell. When they sense high enough levels of ABA, the parasites break out of host cells; otherwise, they stay in the host cell and remain dormant.

With help of online databases and botanists at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis and elsewhere, researchers quickly identified a class of herbicides that block ABA production and that are already in use commercially and screened for low toxicity to animals.

Scientists tested one of those herbicides against toxoplasmosis, labeling the test parasites with the firefly luciferase protein. Whole animal imaging showed that treatment with the herbicide reduced the number of parasites in infected mice during the initial infection and also reduced the chronic burden.

Sibley plans further studies to learn what other aspects of T. gondii biology are controlled by ABA and whether other inhibitors of ABA might make more potent treatments for toxoplasmosis. Nagamune is exploring the new findings’ implications for treatment of malaria.

Source: Washington University School of Medicine

There’s an extremely strong possibility that my current strange flu-like symptoms are caused by toxoplasmosis, and let me tell you: it sucks. If you have a cat and you step on something squishy in the dark, don’t bend down and pick it up - it may be cat feces.

It is truly hilarious to actually have to seriously question whether your own dopamine addiction is serving an alien master - especially if you are in the middle of reading The Filth by Grant Morrison!

(specifically, right at the part near the beginning where the guy keeps insisting that the bacteria and parasites inside him were calling the shots)

Oh, and for what it’s worth: one of my pets infested me with fleas the same day, and now my legs have flea bites - those flu-like symptoms could possibly be lyme disease (though that’s much more likely from a tick)

FUCK

*edit* not to mention: the sick cat, Tony, who figures prominently in The Filth’s plot.

It is estimated that between 30% and 65% of all people worldwide are infected with Toxoplasmosis. However, there is large variation countries: in France, for example, around 88% of the population are carriers, probably due to a high consumption of raw and lightly cooked meat. Germany, the Netherlands and Brazil also have high prevalences of around 80%, over 80% and 67% respectively. In Britain, about 22% are carriers, and South Korea’s rate is only 4.3%

Studies have found that toxoplasmosis is associated with an increased car accident rate, roughly doubling or tripling the chance of an accident relative to uninfected people. This may be due to the slowed reaction times that are associated with infection. “If our data are true then about a million people a year die just because they are infected with toxoplasma,” the researcher Jaroslav Flegr told The Guardian.

From another site:

According to the German Federal Highway Research Institute there are about 336,000 crashes on German roads each year, of which 34,000 result in serious injuries. About 5,360 people are killed each year. Drive safe! Germans are know to drive fast especially on the autobahn!

Brazil has one of the highest rates of Car accident fatalities in the Americas with 24.2 killed in crashes per 100,000 members of the population. Brazil ranks third in the world with worst road death rate per person, just behind El Salvador and the Dominican Republic.

However, comparing this data with that of less-infected nations was not very fruitful. It’s still fascinating.

What do you think my chances of not being infected are if I currently live with two cats and have been in contact with cats all my life?

FUCK.

HOLY SHIT TOXOPLASMOSIS MAKES DOPAMINE

Dopamine is key to a parasite’s ability to unite rat and cat, researcher says
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/november5/sapolsky-110509.html

Who knew cat urine could be sexy? With a dab here and a dab there, you can have male rats swooning over you.

For this unlikely love potion to work, however, the rodents must be infected with a protozoan called Toxoplasma gondii.

This parasite not only invests rats with a permanent suicidal tendency to wander fearlessly into cat territory and certain death, but also makes them mentally and sexually aroused each time their tiny pink noses detect cat smells.

For a long time, scientists have been trying to understand the underlying biology of this odd behavior without any luck. By probing the parasite’s DNA, one Stanford researcher may have stumbled across the answer.

“T. gondii knows how to make dopamine,” neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky said last week during a talk, “Stress, Parasites and Human Behavior,” presented at the annual meeting of the National Association of Science Writers and the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. The Oct. 24-29 meeting was held at Stanford and the Cabana Hotel in Palo Alto.

Sapolsky, the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor, has discovered two genes that play a key role in the synthesis of dopamine, known as the “neurotransmitter of reward”; it is the same chemical that cocaine and others types of psychoactive drugs release in the brain.

Although Sapolsky is not sure if the parasite is secreting the chemical into infected rats or how the mechanism works, he has a good idea about why it is there.

“T. gondii’s evolutionary challenge is to figure out how to get the rodent inside the stomach of the cats,” Sapolsky said. To do this, it has “evolved the means to take over the reward pathway in the rodent brain.”

T. gondii has a two-specie lifecycle beginning with sexual reproduction in the gut of cats. Spores containing fertilized eggs are excreted in the feces. When a rat is infected by ingesting the feces, the parasite migrates from the rat’s intestine to the part of the brain that controls fear, where it forms encapsulated cysts and lies dormant for the rest of the host’s life—or so it was thought.

“This is when it starts doing stuff to the brain,” Sapolsky said.

When an uninfected rat is exposed to cat odor, the fear and anxiety circuits in the brain go crazy, Sapolsky said. But in infected rats, the parasite dampens those signals and instead makes rodents feel positively aroused—both mentally and sexually.

“What this damn parasite knows how to do is make cat urine smell sexy to male rats,” Sapolsky said. After being exposed in laboratory tests to different cat scents, infected male rats showed a spike in testosterone levels and their testes became engorged.

In another test, female rats also responded to the change in hormone levels by showing preference toward infected males approximately 95 percent of the time, Sapolsky said, which came as another interesting find.

“One of the rules of evolutionary biology is if you’re an animal, you don’t want to mate with anyone full of parasites,” Sapolsky said. “Somehow that doesn’t happen with T. gondii infection.”