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It’s time to enjoy some monster stories, and the scariest monsters of all are those that actually exist.
Join us as we share tales of some of the creepiest parasites around — those that control the brains of their human hosts, sometimes leaving insanity and death in their wake. These are the tales of neurological parasites.
The Feline ParasiteToxoplasma gondii tops the list as the most famous — and most controversial — neurological parasite. This tiny protozoan doesn’t look like much more than a blob, but once it makes its way to the brain, it can radically alter the behavior of hosts like rats, cats and, yes, even humans.
T. gondii’s life begins in cat feces, where its eggs (known as “oocytes” or “egg cells”) wait to be picked up by carriers like rats. Once they’re safe and warm in the guts of their temporary hosts, the oocytes morph into tachyzoites, the unassuming little blobs that can really do some damage. Those tachyzoites migrate into their hosts’ muscles, eyes and brains, where they can remain hidden for decades without doing much of anything.
Microscopic cysts containing Toxoplasma gondii in mouse brain tissue. (Credit: Jitender P. Dubey/USDA)
But when the moment comes to strike, the little T. gondii tachyzoites alter their hosts’ brain chemistry. Infected rats actually become
sexually aroused by the smell of cats, and leap fearlessly into their claws, where they die and release the tachyzoites back into the cats, allowing the egg-laying cycle to start anew.
Creepy, perhaps, but not exactly the stuff of nightmares — except that rats aren’t the only hosts in which T. gondii hibernates.
Some researchers estimate that as much as 30 percent of the people on earth — more than two billion of us — are carrying little T. gondii tachyzoites around in our brains right now.What might this mean for human behavior? Just as a start, some
studies have found that cases of schizophrenia rose sharply around the turn of the twentieth century, when domestic cat ownership became common.
“We often see symptoms like altered activity levels, changes in risk behaviors, and decreased reaction times,” says Joanne Webster, a parasitology researcher at Imperial College, London. “But in some cases, they become more severe — like schizophrenia.”
Post time 8-6-2021 08:40 AM
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