1. Arab Conspiracy Theories
Egyptian TV Debate on the "Invasion" of Israeli Products into Sinai: Jeans from
Israel Contained Secret Magnets Causing Infertility
http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/3306.htm
2. Aharon Davidi Passes Away
(Note: Aharan Davidi as far as we know
WAS NOT a relative of Yair Davidiy).
(a) Extracts from Wikipedia Biography of
Aharan Davidi.
Aharon Davidi (1927 ' February 11, 2012) [1] was an Israeli general and founder
of the Sar-El volunteer program of the IDF.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aharon_Davidi
He was born in Israel as the youngest son of an immigrant family from Moldavia.
In 1953, Davidi volunteered for the new IDF paratroopers as a company commander.
The next year, the unit was very active in retaliatory operations and other
dangerous missions behind enemy lines. Davidi and his company supported Ariel
Sharon's Unit 101 in the raid on Qibya, he and Sharon remained close friends. He
was decorated for actions in the Gaza strip in 1955 with the Medal of
Courage.[3]
In the Sinai Campaign, Davidi, as Lieutenant-Colonel and regimental commander,
played a decisive role in the battle of Mitla Pass. From 1965 to 1968, as a
colonel, he was the first commander of the IDF Paratrooper and Infantry Corps.
During the 1967 Six Day War, Davidi commanded the decisive actions to capture
Sharm-el-Sheik. When Raful Eitan was wounded in action, Davidi led his
paratroopers to the Suez Canal.
In 1970 he retired as Brigadier from active military service and spent three
years at the University of London earning his MA and PhD. He focused on the
cultural problems of Chinese minorities.
Davidi began teaching geography at Tel Aviv University in 1974. Three years
later, he moved to the Golan Heights as Director of Community and Cultural
Activities of the Golan and Jordan Valley. In the summer of 1982, during the
1982 Lebanon War, Davidi founded the Sar-El IDF volunteer program. In 2010,
Davidi won the Moskowitz Prize for Zionism.[4]
Davidi, who lived in Ramat Gan, had three children, 11 grandchildren. and two
great-grandchildren. His sister, Rivka Davidit, was a Hebrew children's author
and theater critic.
Brig. Gen. (ret.) Dr. Aharon Davidi died on February 11, 2012.
(b) Aharon Davidi ' A Son of a
Disappearing Generation
http://muchcourageandpeace.wordpress.com/2012
/02/13/aharon-davidi-a-son-
of-a-disappearing-generation/
Posted on February 13, 2012 by Much Courage and Peace
Extract:
Retired Lieutenant-General Aharon Davidi passed away last Saturday at the age of
84. His name is closely linked with Israel's security and wars, from the days of
the Hagana, Palmach and the Independence war, through the era of the retaliation
operations and the Sinai war to the Six Days war and the attrition war that
followed it. More than once, Davidi replaced under enemy fire commanders who
were wounded or killed and led the forces over which he took command to victory
in battle. For one of these actions, in a retaliation operation in Gaza in 1956,
he received a medal of bravery from Israel's Chief of Staff. He built the
reserve forces of the paratroopers' brigade and was Israel's first Paratroopers
Chief Commanding Officer. His activities in support of the Kurds in Iraq will
probably be only fully recognised in the future. After retiring from the IDF in
1972, Davidi was involved as a civilian in many voluntary and Zionist
activities.
3. Science:
How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/
archive/2012/03/how-your-cat-is
-making-you-crazy/8873/'single_page=
true
By Kathleen McAuliffe
forwarded by Max Rambow
Extracts:
No one would accuse Jaroslav Flegr of being a conformist. A self-described
'sloppy dresser,' the 63-year-old Czech scientist has the contemplative air of
someone habitually lost in thought, and his still-youthful, square-jawed face is
framed by frizzy red hair that encircles his head like a ring of fire.
Certainly Flegr's thinking is jarringly unconventional. Starting in the early
1990s, he began to suspect that a single-celled parasite in the protozoan family
was subtly manipulating his personality, causing him to behave in strange, often
self-destructive ways. And if it was messing with his mind, he reasoned, it was
probably doing the same to others.
The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma
gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes
toxoplasmosis'the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats' litter boxes.
Since the 1920s, doctors have recognized that a woman who becomes infected
during pregnancy can transmit the disease to the fetus, in some cases resulting
in severe brain damage or death. T. gondii is also a major threat to people with
weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, before good
antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that
afflicted many patients at the disease's end stage. Healthy children and adults,
however, usually experience nothing worse than brief flu-like symptoms before
quickly fighting off the protozoan, which thereafter lies dormant inside brain
cells'or at least that's the standard medical wisdom.
But if Flegr is right, the 'latent' parasite may be quietly tweaking the
connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening
situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference
for certain scents. And that's not all. He also believes that the organism
contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as
schizophrenia. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr,
'Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million
people a year.'
An evolutionary biologist at Charles University in Prague, Flegr has pursued
this theory for decades in relative obscurity. ...
But after years of being ignored or discounted, Flegr is starting to gain
respectability. Psychedelic as his claims may sound, many researchers, including
such big names in neuroscience as Stanford's Robert Sapolsky, think he could
well be onto something. Flegr's 'studies are well conducted, and I can see no
reason to doubt them,' Sapolsky tells me. Indeed, recent findings from
Sapolsky's lab and British groups suggest that the parasite is capable of
extraordinary shenanigans. T. gondii, reports Sapolsky, can turn a rat's strong
innate aversion to cats into an attraction, luring it into the jaws of its No. 1
predator. Even more amazing is how it does this: the organism rewires circuits
in parts of the brain that deal with such primal emotions as fear, anxiety, and
sexual arousal. 'Overall,' says Sapolsky, 'this is wild, bizarre neurobiology.'
Another academic heavyweight who takes Flegr seriously is the schizophrenia
expert E. Fuller Torrey, director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute, in
Maryland. 'I admire Jaroslav for doing [this research],' he says. 'It's
obviously not politically correct, in the sense that not many labs are doing it.
He's done it mostly on his own, with very little support. I think it bears
looking at. I find it completely credible.'
What's more, many experts think T. gondii may be far from the only microscopic
puppeteer capable of pulling our strings. 'My guess is that there are scads more
examples of this going on in mammals, with parasites we've never even heard of,'
says Sapolsky.
Familiar to most of us, of course, is the rabies virus. On the verge of killing
a dog, bat, or other warm-blooded host, it stirs the animal into a rage while
simultaneously migrating from the nervous system to the creature's saliva,
ensuring that when the host bites, the virus will live on in a new carrier. But
aside from rabies, stories of parasites commandeering the behavior of
large-brained mammals are rare. The far more common victims of parasitic mind
control'at least the ones we know about'are fish, crustaceans, and legions of
insects, according to Janice Moore, a behavioral biologist at Colorado State
University. 'Flies, ants, caterpillars, wasps, you name it'there are truckloads
of them behaving weirdly as a result of parasites,' she says.
Consider Polysphincta gutfreundi, a parasitic wasp that grabs hold of an orb
spider and attaches a tiny egg to its belly. A wormlike larva emerges from the
egg, and then releases chemicals that prompt the spider to abandon weaving its
familiar spiral web and instead spin its silk thread into a special pattern that
will hold the cocoon in which the larva matures. The 'possessed' spider even
crochets a specific geometric design in the net, camouflaging the cocoon from
the wasp's predators.
Flegr himself traces his life's work to another master of mind control. Almost
30 years ago, as he was reading a book by the British evolutionary biologist
Richard Dawkins, Flegr was captivated by a passage describing how a flatworm
turns an ant into its slave by invading the ant's nervous system. A drop in
temperature normally causes ants to head underground, but the infected insect
instead climbs to the top of a blade of grass and clamps down on it, becoming
easy prey for a grazing sheep. 'Its mandibles actually become locked in that
position, so there's nothing the ant can do except hang there in the air,' says
Flegr. The sheep grazes on the grass and eats the ant; the worm gains entrance
into the ungulate's gut, which is exactly where it needs to be in order to
complete'as the Lion King song goes'the circle of life. 'It was the first I
learned about this kind of manipulation, so it made a big impression on me,'
Flegr says.
After he read the book, Flegr began to make a connection that, he readily
admits, others might find crazy: his behavior, he noticed, shared similarities
with that of the reckless ant....
His bewilderment continued until 1990, when he joined the biology faculty of
Charles University. As it happened, the 650-year-old institution had long been a
world leader in documenting the health effects of T. gondii, as well as
developing methods for detecting the parasite. In fact, just as Flegr was
arriving, his colleagues were searching for infected individuals on whom to test
their improved diagnostic kits, which is how he came to be asked one day to roll
up his sleeve and donate blood. He discovered that he had the parasite'and just
possibly, he thought, the key to his baffling self-destructive streak.
He delved into T. gondii's life cycle. After an infected cat defecates, Flegr
learned, the parasite is typically picked up from the soil by scavenging or
grazing animals'notably rodents, pigs, and cattle'all of which then harbor it in
their brain and other body tissues. Humans, on the other hand, are exposed not
only by coming into contact with litter boxes, but also, he found, by drinking
water contaminated with cat feces, eating unwashed vegetables, or, especially in
Europe, by consuming raw or undercooked meat. Hence the French, according to
Flegr, with their love of steak prepared saignant'literally, 'bleeding''can have
infection rates as high as 55 percent. (Americans will be happy to hear that the
parasite resides in far fewer of them, though a still substantial portion: 10 to
20 percent.) Once inside an animal or human host, the parasite then needs to get
back into the cat, the only place where it can sexually reproduce'and this is
when, Flegr believed, behavioral manipulation might come into play.
Researchers had already observed a few peculiarities about rodents with T.
gondii that bolstered Flegr's theory. The infected rodents were much more active
in running wheels than uninfected rodents were, suggesting that they would be
more-attractive targets for cats, which are drawn to fast-moving objects. They
also were less wary of predators in exposed spaces. Little, however, was known
about how the latent infection might influence humans, because we and other
large mammals were widely presumed to be accidental hosts, or, as scientists are
fond of putting it, a 'dead end' for the parasite. But even if we were never
part of the parasite's life cycle, Flegr reasoned, mammals from mouse to man
share the vast majority of their genes, so we might, in a case of mistaken
identity, still be vulnerable to manipulations by the parasite.
In the Soviet-stunted economy, animal studies were way beyond Flegr's research
budget. But fortunately for him, 30 to 40 percent of Czechs had the latent form
of the disease, so plenty of students were available 'to serve as very cheap
experimental animals.' He began by giving them and their parasite-free peers
standardized personality tests'an inexpensive, if somewhat crude, method of
measuring differences between the groups. In addition, he used a computer-based
test to assess the reaction times of participants, who were instructed to press
a button as soon as a white square popped up anywhere against the dark
background of the monitor.
The subjects who tested positive for the parasite had significantly delayed
reaction times. Flegr was especially surprised to learn, though, that the
protozoan appeared to cause many sex-specific changes in personality. Compared
with uninfected men, males who had the parasite were more introverted,
suspicious, oblivious to other people's opinions of them, and inclined to
disregard rules. Infected women, on the other hand, presented in exactly the
opposite way: they were more outgoing, trusting, image-conscious, and
rule-abiding than uninfected women.
The findings were so bizarre that Flegr initially assumed his data must be
flawed. So he tested other groups'civilian and military populations. Again, the
same results. Then, in search of more corroborating evidence, he brought
subjects in for further observation and a battery of tests, in which they were
rated by someone ignorant of their infection status. To assess whether
participants valued the opinions of others, the rater judged how well dressed
they appeared to be. As a measure of gregariousness, participants were asked
about the number of friends they'd interacted with over the past two weeks. To
test whether they were prone to being suspicious, they were asked, among other
things, to drink an unidentified liquid.
The results meshed well with the questionnaire findings. Compared with
uninfected people of the same sex, infected men were more likely to wear rumpled
old clothes; infected women tended to be more meticulously attired, many showing
up for the study in expensive, designer-brand clothing. Infected men tended to
have fewer friends, while infected women tended to have more. And when it came
to downing the mystery fluid, reports Flegr, 'the infected males were much more
hesitant than uninfected men. They wanted to know why they had to do it. Would
it harm them'' In contrast, the infected women were the most trusting of all
subjects. 'They just did what they were told,' he says.
Why men and women reacted so differently to the parasite still mystified him.
After consulting the psychological literature, he started to suspect that
heightened anxiety might be the common denominator underlying their responses.
When under emotional strain, he read, women seek solace through social bonding
and nurturing. In the lingo of psychologists, they're inclined to 'tend and
befriend.' Anxious men, on the other hand, typically respond by withdrawing and
becoming hostile or antisocial. Perhaps he was looking at flip sides of the same
coin.
Closer inspection of Flegr's reaction-time results revealed that infected
subjects became less attentive and slowed down a minute or so into the test.
This suggested to him that Toxoplasma might have an adverse impact on driving,
where constant vigilance and fast reflexes are critical. He launched two major
epidemiological studies in the Czech Republic, one of men and women in the
general population and another of mostly male drivers in the military. Those who
tested positive for the parasite, both studies showed, were about two and a half
times as likely to be in a traffic accident as their uninfected peers. ..
He's published some data, he tells me, that suggest infected males might have
elevated testosterone levels. Possibly for that reason, women shown photos of
these men rate them as more masculine than pictures of uninfected men. 'I want
to investigate this more closely to see if it's true,' he says. 'Also, it could
be women find infected men more attractive. That's something else we hope to
test.'
Meanwhile, two Turkish studies have replicated his studies linking Toxoplasma to
traffic accidents. With up to one-third of the world infected with the parasite,
Flegr now calculates that T. gondii is a likely factor in several hundred
thousand road deaths each year. In addition, reanalysis of his
personality-questionnaire data revealed that, just like him, many other people
who have the latent infection feel intrepid in dangerous situations. 'Maybe,' he
says, 'that's another reason they get into traffic accidents. They don't have a
normal fear response.'
It's almost impossible to hear about Flegr's research without wondering whether
you're infected'especially if, like me, you're a cat owner, favor very rare
meat, and identify even a little bit with your Toxo sex stereotype. So before
coming to Prague, I'd gotten tested for the parasite, but I didn't yet know the
results. It seemed a good time to see what his intuition would tell me. 'Can you
guess from observing someone whether they have the parasite'myself, for
example',' I ask.
'No,' he says, 'the parasite's effects on personality are very subtle.' If, as a
woman, you were introverted before being infected, he says, the parasite won't
turn you into a raving extrovert. It might just make you a little less
introverted. 'I'm very typical of Toxoplasma males,' he continues. 'But I don't
know whether my personality traits have anything to do with the infection. It's
impossible to say for any one individual. You usually need about 50 people who
are infected and 50 who are not, in order to see a statistically significant
difference. The vast majority of people will have no idea they're infected.'
Still, he concedes, the parasite could be very bad news for a small percentage
of people'and not just those who might be at greater risk for car accidents.
Many schizophrenia patients show shrinkage in parts of their cerebral cortex,
and Flegr thinks the protozoan may be to blame for that. He hands me a recently
published paper on the topic that he co-authored with colleagues at Charles
University, including a psychiatrist named Jiri Horacek. Twelve of 44
schizophrenia patients who underwent MRI scans, the team found, had reduced gray
matter in the brain'and the decrease occurred almost exclusively in those who
tested positive for T. gondii. After reading the abstract, I must look stunned,
because Flegr smiles and says, 'Jiri had the same response. I don't think he
believed it could be true.' When I later speak with Horacek, he admits to having
been skeptical about Flegr's theory at the outset. When they merged the MRI
results with the infection data, however, he went from being a doubter to being
a believer. 'I was amazed at how pronounced the effect was,' he says. 'To me
that suggests the parasite may trigger schizophrenia in genetically susceptible
people.'
One might be tempted to dismiss the bulk of Flegr's work as hokum'the fanciful
imaginings of a lone, eccentric scholar'were it not for the pioneering research
of Joanne Webster, a parasitologist at Imperial College London. Just as Flegr
was embarking on his human trials, Webster, then a freshly minted Ph.D., was
launching studies of Toxo-infected rodents, reasoning, just as Flegr did, that
as hosts of the parasite, they would be likely targets for behavioral
manipulation.
She quickly confirmed, as previous researchers had shown, that infected rats
were more active and less cautious in areas where predators lurk. But then, in a
simple, elegant experiment, she and her colleagues demonstrated that the
parasite did something much more remarkable. They treated one corner of each
rat's enclosure with the animal's own odor, a second with water, a third with
cat urine, and the last corner with the urine of a rabbit, a creature that does
not prey on rodents. 'We thought the parasite might reduce the rats' aversion to
cat odor,' she told me. 'Not only did it do that, but it actually increased
their attraction. They spent more time in the cat-treated areas.' She and other
scientists repeated the experiment with the urine of dogs and minks, which also
prey on rodents. The effect was so specific to cat urine, she says, that 'we
call it 'fatal feline attraction.''
She began tagging the parasite with fluorescent markers and tracking its
progress in the rats' bodies. Given the surgically precise way the microbe
alters behavior, Webster anticipated that it would end up in localized regions
of the brain. But the results defied expectations. 'We were quite surprised to
find the cysts'the parasite's dormant form'all over the brain in what otherwise
appeared to be a happy, healthy rat,' she says. Nonetheless, the cysts were most
abundant in a part of the brain that deals with pleasure (in human terms, we're
talking sex, drugs, and rock and roll) and in another area that's involved in
fear and anxiety (post-traumatic stress disorder affects this region of the
brain). Perhaps, she thought, T. gondii uses a scattershot approach,
disseminating cysts far and wide, enabling a few of them to zero in on the right
targets.
To gain more clarity on the matter, she sought the aid of the parasitologist
Glenn McConkey, whose team at the University of Leeds was probing the
protozoan's genome for signs of what it might be doing. The approach brought to
light a striking talent of the parasite: it has two genes that allow it to crank
up production of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the host brain. 'We never
cease to be amazed by the sophistication of these parasites,' Webster says.
Their findings, reported last summer, created immediate buzz. Dopamine is a
critical signaling molecule involved in fear, pleasure, and attention.
Furthermore, the neurotransmitter is known to be jacked up in people with
schizophrenia'another one of those strange observations about the disease, like
its tendency to erode gray matter, that have long puzzled medical researchers.
Antipsychotic medicine designed to quell schizophrenic delusions apparently
blocks the action of dopamine, which had suggested to Webster that what it might
really be doing is thwarting the parasite. Scientists had already shown that
adding the medicine to a petri dish where T. gondii is happily dividing will
stunt the organism's growth. So Webster decided to feed the antipsychotic drug
to newly infected rats to see how they reacted. Lo and behold, they didn't
develop fatal feline attraction. Suddenly, attributing behavioral changes to the
microbe seemed much more plausible.
As the scientific community digested the British team's dopamine discoveries,
Robert Sapolsky's lab at Stanford announced still more attention-grabbing news.
The neuroscientist and his colleagues found that T. gondii disconnects fear
circuits in the brain, which might help to explain why infected rats lose their
aversion to cat odor. Just as startling, reports Sapolsky, the parasite
simultaneously is 'able to hijack some of the circuitry related to sexual
arousal' in the male rat'probably, he theorizes, by boosting dopamine levels in
the reward-processing part of the brain. So when the animal catches a whiff of
cat scent, the fear center fails to fully light up, as it would in a normal rat,
and instead the area governing sexual pleasure begins to glow. 'In other words,'
he says, 'Toxo makes cat odor smell sexy to male rats.'
The neurobiologist Ajai Vyas, after working with Sapolsky on this study as a
postdoctoral student, decided to inspect infected rats' testicles for signs of
cysts. Sure enough, he found them there'as well as in the animals' semen. And
when the rat copulates, Vyas discovered, the protozoan moves into the female's
womb, typically infecting 60 percent of her pups, before traveling on up to her
own brain'creating still more vehicles for ferrying the parasite back into the
belly of a cat.
Could T. gondii be a sexually transmitted disease in humans too' 'That's what we
hope to find out,' says Vyas, who now works at Nanyang Technological University,
in Singapore. The researchers also discovered that infected male rats suddenly
become much more attractive to females. 'It's a very strong effect,' says Vyas.
'Seventy-five percent of the females would rather spend time with the infected
male.'
After I return from Prague, Flegr informs me that he's just had a paper accepted
for publication that, he claims, 'proves fatal feline attraction in humans.' By
that he means that infected men like the smell of cat pee'or at least they rank
its scent much more favorably than uninfected men do. Displaying the
characteristic sex differences that define many Toxo traits, infected women have
the reverse response, ranking the scent even more offensive than do women free
of the parasite. The sniff test was done blind and also included urine collected
from a dog, horse, hyena, and tiger. Infection did not affect how subjects rated
these other samples.
'Is it possible cat urine may be an aphrodisiac for infected men',' I ask. 'Yes.
It's possible. Why not'' says Flegr. I think he's smiling at the other end of
the phone line, but I'm not sure, which leaves me wondering whether I've
stumbled onto a topic ripe for a Saturday Night Live skit, or a matter worthy of
medical concern. When I ask Sapolsky about Flegr's most recent research, he says
the effects Flegr is reporting 'are incredibly cool. However, I'm not too
worried, in that the effects on humans are not gigantic. If you want to reduce
serious car accidents, and you had to choose between curing people of Toxo
infections versus getting people not to drive drunk or while texting, go for the
latter in terms of impact.'
In fact, Sapolsky thinks that Toxo's inventiveness might even offer us some
benefits. If we can figure out how the parasite makes animals less fearful, he
says, it might give us insights into how to devise treatments for people plagued
by social-anxiety disorder, phobias, PTSD, and the like. 'But frankly,' he adds,
'this mostly falls into the 'Get a load of this, can you believe what nature has
come up with'' category.'
Webster is more circumspect, if not downright troubled. 'I don't want to cause
any panic,' she tells me. 'In the vast majority of people, there will be no ill
effects, and those who are affected will mostly demonstrate subtle shifts of
behavior. But in a small number of cases, [Toxo infection] may be linked to
schizophrenia and other disturbances associated with altered dopamine levels'for
example, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity
disorder, and mood disorders. The rat may live two or three years, while humans
can be infected for many decades, which is why we may be seeing these severe
side effects in people. We should be cautious of dismissing such a prevalent
parasite.'
The psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey agrees'though he came to this viewpoint from a
completely different angle than either Webster or Flegr. His opinion stems from
decades of research into the root causes of schizophrenia. 'Textbooks today
still make silly statements that schizophrenia has always been around, it's
about the same incidence all over the world, and it's existed since time
immemorial,' he says. 'The epidemiology literature contradicts that completely.'
In fact, he says, schizophrenia did not rise in prevalence until the latter half
of the 18th century, when for the first time people in Paris and London started
keeping cats as pets. The so-called cat craze began among 'poets and left-wing
avant-garde Greenwich Village types,' says Torrey, but the trend spread
rapidly'and coinciding with that development, the incidence of schizophrenia
soared.
Since the 1950s, he notes, about 70 epidemiology studies have explored a link
between schizophrenia and T. gondii. When he and his colleague Robert Yolken, a
neurovirologist at Johns Hopkins University, surveyed a subset of these papers
that met rigorous scientific standards, their conclusion complemented the Prague
group's discovery that schizophrenic patients with Toxo are missing gray matter
in their brains. Torrey and Yolken found that the mental illness is two to three
times as common in people who have the parasite as in controls from the same
region.
Human-genome studies, both scientists believe, are also in keeping with that
finding'and might explain why schizophrenia runs in families. The most
replicated result from that line of investigation, they say, suggests that the
genes most commonly associated with schizophrenia relate to the immune system
and how it reacts to infectious agents. So in many cases where the disease
appears to be hereditary, they theorize, what may in fact be passed down is an
aberrant or deficient immune response to invaders like T. gondii.
Epstein-Barr virus, mumps, rubella, and other infectious agents, they point out,
have also been linked to schizophrenia'and there are probably more as yet
unidentified triggers, including many that have nothing to do with pathogens.
But for now, they say, Toxo remains the strongest environmental factor
implicated in the disorder. 'If I had to guess,' says Torrey, 'I'd say 75
percent of cases of schizophrenia are associated with infectious agents, and
Toxo would be involved in a significant subset of those.'
Just as worrisome, says Torrey, the parasite may also increase the risk of
suicide. In a 2011 study of 20 European countries, the national suicide rate
among women increased in direct proportion to the prevalence of the latent Toxo
infection in each nation's female population. According to Teodor Postolache, a
psychiatrist and the director of the Mood and Anxiety Program at the University
of Maryland School of Medicine, a flurry of other studies, several conducted by
his own team, offers further support of T. gondii's link to higher rates of
suicidal behavior. These include investigations of general populations as well
as groups made up of patients with bipolar disorder, severe depression, and
schizophrenia, and in places as diverse as Turkey, Germany, and the
Baltimore/Washington area. Exactly how the parasite may push vulnerable people
over the edge is yet to be determined. Postolache theorizes that what disrupts
mood and the ability to control violent impulses may not be the organism per se,
but rather neurochemical changes associated with the body's immune response to
it. 'As far-fetched as these ideas may sound,' says Postolache, 'the American
Foundation for Suicide Prevention was willing to put money behind this
research.'
Given all the nasty science swirling around this parasite, is it time for cat
lovers to switch their allegiance to other animals'
Even Flegr would advise against that. Indoor cats pose no threat, he says,
because they don't carry the parasite. As for outdoor cats, they shed the
parasite for only three weeks of their life, typically when they're young and
have just begun hunting. During that brief period, Flegr simply recommends
taking care to keep kitchen counters and tables wiped clean. (He practices what
he preaches: he and his wife have two school-age children, and two outdoor cats
that have free roam of their home.) Much more important for preventing exposure,
he says, is to scrub vegetables thoroughly and avoid drinking water that has not
been properly purified, especially in the developing world, where infection
rates can reach 95 percent in some places. Also, he advises eating meat on the
well-done side'or, if that's not to your taste, freezing it before cooking, to
kill the cysts.
As concerns about the latent infection mount, however, experts have begun
thinking about more-aggressive steps to counter the parasite's spread.
Inoculating cats or livestock against T. gondii might be one way to interrupt
its life cycle, offers Johns Hopkins' Robert Yolken. Moving beyond prevention to
treatment is a taller order. Once the parasite becomes deeply ensconced in brain
cells, routing it out of the body is virtually impossible: the thick-walled
cysts are impregnable to antibiotics. Because T. gondii and the malaria
protozoan are related, however, Yolken and other researchers are looking among
antimalarial agents for more-effective drugs to attack the cysts. But for now,
medicine has no therapy to offer people who want to rid themselves of the latent
infection; and until solid proof exists that Toxo is as dangerous as some
scientists now fear, pharmaceutical companies don't have much incentive to
develop anti-Toxo drugs.
Yolken hopes that will change. 'To explain where we are in Toxo research today,'
he says, 'the analogy I always give is the ulcer bacteria. We first needed to
find ways of treating the organism and showing that the disease went away when
you did that. We will have to show that when we very effectively treat
Toxoplasma, some portion of psychiatric illness goes away.'
But T. gondii is just one of an untold number of infectious agents that prey on
us. And if the rest of the animal kingdom is anything to go by, says Colorado
State University's Janice Moore, plenty of them may be capable of tinkering with
our minds. For example, she and Chris Reiber, a biomedical anthropologist at
Binghamton University, in New York, strongly suspected that the flu virus might
boost our desire to socialize. Why' Because it spreads through close physical
contact, often before symptoms emerge'meaning that it must find a new host
quickly. To explore this hunch, Moore and Reiber tracked 36 subjects who
received a flu vaccine, reasoning that it contains many of the same chemical
components as the live virus and would thus cause the subjects' immune systems
to react as if they'd encountered the real pathogen.
The difference in the subjects' behavior before and after vaccination was
pronounced: the flu shot had the effect of nearly doubling the number of people
with whom the participants came in close contact during the brief window when
the live virus was maximally contagious. 'People who had very limited or simple
social lives were suddenly deciding that they needed to go out to bars or
parties, or invite a bunch of people over,' says Reiber. 'This happened with
lots of our subjects. It wasn't just one or two outliers.'
Reiber has her eye trained on other human pathogens that she thinks may well be
playing similar games, if only science could prove it. For example, she says,
many people at the end stages of AIDS and syphilis express an intense craving
for sex. So, too, do individuals at the beginning of a herpes outbreak. These
may just be anecdotal accounts, she concedes, but based on her own findings, she
wouldn't be surprised if these urges come from the pathogen making known its
will to survive.
'We've found all kinds of excuses for why we do the things we do,' observes
Moore. ''My genes made me do it.' 'My parents are to blame.' I'm afraid we may
have reached the point where parasites may have to be added to the laundry list
of excuses.'
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