Post a Comment On: Internal Monologue

Via Feministing, we get a link to a study that makes a rather shocking claim:
Parasite turns women into 'sex kittens'The article goes on to explain:
"Interestingly, the effect of infection is different between men and women," Dr Boulter writes in the latest issue of Australasian Science magazine. "Infected men have lower IQs, achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans. They are also more likely to break rules and take risks, be more independent, more anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose, and are deemed less attractive to women. "On the other hand, infected women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls.Given that around 40% of the world's population is infected with this (Toxoplasma gondii), I suspect that the "sex kitten" transformation does not happen in all cases (unless there are a lot more nymphos out there that I missed out on in my single days).

I actually have some experience studying this organism. When in high school, I had a research internship at Hennepin County Medical Center. We were studying the life cycle of this organism because it was the leading cause of AIDS-induced encephalitis (and probably still is, though I haven't kept up on things). Ususally, it just sits around in your brain in these horrid cysts and doesn't do much (or so we thought at the time (1991)--maybe it changes behavior). But if you get immuno-compromised (i.e. lose your immune system) they can cause all kinds of problems and kill you.

When I was working on this organism, one of the researchers told me that 90% of French women are infected with this, due to their fondness for cats and rare meat (I didn't learn the male infection rate; Wikipedia entry has a similar stat). Could personality changes induced by this organism be responsible for certain national stereotypes? Could anti "toxo" (the researchers I worked with usually just called it "toxo" for short) treatments reverse those personality changes? Here's a Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) picutre of Toxoplasma gondii similar to the ones I spent some time looking at. I stole it from Johns Hopkins Medecine (only the best for Internal Monologue readers):

[Image]The toxos are the dark blobs. It still creeps me out that zillions of those could be infecting my brain at this very moment. Yuck.