There's a 25% chance blog readers are infected by Toxoplasma gondii
Orange tabby kittens. Photo by Nagamori
Not just blog readers, it’s said a quarter of humanity is infected by , though I’d guess viewers of Cute Overload are slightly more likely to be infected. That’s because according to this post I found at MicrobiologyBytes, is a parasite transmitted by felines. Alan Cann adds:
Can an infectious disease indirectly alter human culture through its effects on personality? People infected with T. gondii experience long-term personality changes: * Women become more intelligent, warm, outgoing, attentive to others, kindly, easy-going. * Men show lower intelligence, novelty-seeking and bad tempered. * Both infected men and women have higher levels of guilt-proneness.
You can find more at his post Dominated by men? where he talks about the paper Can the common brain parasite, , influence human culture? by Kevin Lafferty in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
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