• Question: What’s the weirdest way you can catch a disease?

    Asked by anon-256873 on 18 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Lucy McGowan

      Lucy McGowan answered on 18 Jun 2020:

      There’s a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii. It’s actually a very common parasite around the world. It doesn’t harm or even cause symptoms in most people. It can be dangerous to pregnant women or people with weak immune systems though. You can catch Toxoplasma gondii by eating rare meat from an infected animal – it’s thought that’s one of the reasons it’s very common in France with about 80% of people infected (as rare meat is common in French cuisine).
      The really strange thing about this parasite is that is can only sexually reproduce inside a cat. Only cats, no other animal. So people with cats as pets are more likely to catch it. The most fascinating thing about this parasite is that it can alter the minds of the people it infects. It’s thought that the parasite can lower an animal’s perception of fear, making them more likely to take risks! Because the parasite HAS to get into a cat to it can reproduce, it can sometimes manipulate it’s host into strange behaviour. For example, it is known that if it infects a mouse, the mouse can lose its fear of cats and will happily run around in front of a cat and get eaten! This gets the parasite back inside the cat! It think that’s just incredible since the parasite is only one-cell and is microscopic!

    • Photo: Rachel Tanner

      Rachel Tanner answered on 19 Jun 2020:

      What a cool question, thanks Alexandra! There’s a deadly brain-eating amoeba that enters the body through the nose when people swim in warm water that’s infected with it (you can’t catch it from drinking the water – only from snorting it!). There’s another deadly disease I talk about in my lectures called Kuru, which is caused by an infectious protein called a prion. It gets spread by cannibalism (eating other people) – particularly if the brain is eaten. Because a particular tribe in Papua New Guinea used to honour their dead by cannibalism during the funeral rites, Kuru used to be quite common in those communities. Sometimes Kuru is called the laughing disease because it affects the nervous system and one of the symptoms is spontaneous bursts of laughter (as well as shivering and trembling).

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