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OK, Cats Probably Aren’t

Causing Danish Women To Kill
Themselves
By LINDSAY BEYERSTEIN JULY 03, 2012 • 5:06 PM

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Still, it never hurts to be careful

Photo by Vyavheslav Oseledko/AFP/Getty Images.

Danish women infected with the toxoplasmosis parasite, a crescent-shaped freeloader that
lives in rats and humans but can only reproduce in the guts of cats, were 1.5 times more likely to
attempt suicide than their toxo-free counterparts, according to a new study published online in
the Archives of General Psychiatry. Jezebel pounced, asking, “Are Cat Ladies More Likely To
Commit Suicide?”

Toxoplasmosis is a simple organism that has evolved an elegant mind-bending mechanism for
passing on its genes. When rats eat toxoplasmosis eggs in cat feces, they lose their fear of cats
and become attracted to cat urine. These unwary rodents are then more likely to be eaten by
cats, and the cycle begins again.

So how does it work? Rats instinctively fear the smell of cat pee, but the toxo parasite hijacks
their brains to replace the normal hard-wired fear response with sexual arousal, especially in
males. These rats don’t lose all fear. They are still afraid of most of the usual rat-scary stuff, like
bright lights and dog urine. They just aren’t afraid of the smell of cat pee anymore. In fact, the
males literally have a hard-on for the stuff. Of course, rats who are attracted to cat pee are more
likely to get eaten by cats.

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Humans, however, are unlikely to be eaten by cats, so where do we fit in?

When humans get infected—more often from rare meat and unwashed veggies than from cat
boxes—the parasite settles into our muscles and brains and stays there, hidden from the
immune system in protective cysts. About a third of people in developed countries are toxo
carriers. The conventional medical wisdom is that toxo causes a brief mono-like illness in
otherwise healthy people and becomes dormant thereafter.

However, a growing body of research suggests that toxo can subtly affect human behavior.
Carriers are, then, more likely to try to kill themselves, and nearly three times more likely to die
in car accidents.

Toxoplasmosis researcher Robert Sapolsky thinks toxoplasmosis might be affecting us the way
it affects rats:

[Y]ou take a Toxo-infected rat and it does some dumb-ass thing that it should be innately
skittish about, like going right up to cat smells. Maybe you take a Toxo-infected human and they
start having a proclivity towards doing dumb-ass things that we should be innately averse to,
like having your body hurdle through space at high G-forces.

Interestingly, the effects of toxoplasmosis vary by gender in rats and humans. Infected male
rats become markedly more impulsive, females not as much. A series of small studies that
compared personality tests in carriers and noncarriers found that men with toxoplasmosis
were more “expedient, suspicious, jealous, and dogmatic,” whereas female carriers were
warmer and more conscientious. It’s not clear how these findings square with the observation
that women with toxo are more likely to harm themselves. Maybe toxo actually increases
aggression and impulsivity in both genders, but women are more likely to turn these impulses
inward.

Something to think about next time you’re tempted to order your pork loin super-rare. Then
again, the fact that you’re even considering such a reckless act probably means you’re already
infected.

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