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Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

Articles like this are incredibly frustrating, as they raise very serious concerns, but fail to address very basic points:

- Does your body ever rid itself of this infection on its own?

- Are there any treatments for this disease?

- If there are treatments, is there any point in using them if you own cats? ie, will you simply be reinfected again in short order?

- Does the disease aerosol-ize with litter dust?

- Given that cats lick their butts and also walk in their litter box, is it even possible that careful litterbox handling could ever be a sufficient method for prevention?

- If this disease is so ubiquitous, how do we know it's harmful?

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Ehhh, you are trying to spoil everything. With those questions answered all serious concerns become not so serious. Yes, people recover from it by themselves without even knowing they were infected. Yes, there is medicine for this. The only danger is for pregnant women as it might affect a baby. So pregnant women are tested.

For me this article is just some incarnation of http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

> http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

> Online, the answer tends to be a lot simpler. Most people who publish online write what they write for the simple reason that they want to. You can't see the fingerprints of PR firms all over the articles, as you can in so many print publications-- which is one of the reasons, though they may not consciously realize it, that readers trust bloggers more than Business Week.

> Whatever its flaws, the writing you find online is authentic. It's not mystery meat cooked up out of scraps of pitch letters and press releases, and pressed into molds of zippy journalese. It's people writing what they think.

God damn it, that gave me some _hard_ nostalgia for the Internet of 2005.

Yeah, that bit about writing online being "authentic" didn't age well. Hell, if my buddy's '05-era content farm was any indication, Graham was wrong when he wrote that.

> Does your body ever rid itself of this infection on its own?

Sometimes, no. And then you'll take sulfadiazine and pyrimetamine and have the worst headache you can imagine.

> Are there any treatments for this disease?

For each manifestation of it, yes. To get rid of it, no. You'll have it forever inside your body. And in those times that you immunity is low it can manifest itself again.[1]

And then "Decreased visual acuity may occur as a result of macular involvement or severe vitreous inflammation" [0].

[0] https://www.reviewofophthalmology.com/article/how-to-diagnos...

[1] "However, the parasite remains in the person’s body in an inactive state. It can become reactivated if the person becomes immunosuppressed." https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/toxoplasmosis/disease.html

(edited: add more reference)

It's not even like direct contact with cats is the main vector of infection -

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1118145/

"Overall, eating raw or undercooked beef, lamb, or other meats; contact with soil; and travel outside the country were major sources of infection."

"direct contact with cats is irrelevant with respect to T gondii transmission"

It seems what's more important is keeping cats away from livestock.

From what I remember from monograph I read about decade ago.

>Does your body ever rid itself of this infection on its own?

No, but it gets used to it.

>Are there any treatments for this disease?

Only for acute form. But it's usually latent and the cysts in the brain are treatment resistant.

>If this disease is so ubiquitous, how do we know it's harmful?

It lowers reaction speeds, inhibits fear, can cause reckless behaviour. There were found correlations between infection of Toxoplasma gondii and development of psychiatric illnesses like schizophrenia.

That would actually provide useful information instead of just spreading fear mongering which... wasn't the intention of this article.

>Does your body ever rid itself of this infection on its own?

Your body can drive it dormant, or eradicate it. Tough to know if either of these have happened definitively.

>Are there any treatments for this disease?

Yes, there are antiparasitics in the class of malaria drugs etc

>If there are treatments, is there any point in using them if you own cats? ie, will you simply be reinfected again in short order?

Probably no studies on reinfection but you can check

>Does the disease aerosol-ize with litter dust?

Yes

>Given that cats lick their butts and also walk in their litter box, is it even possible that careful litterbox handling could ever be a sufficient method for prevention?

Yes it is a significant mitigation

>If this disease is so ubiquitous, how do we know it's harmful?

You could ask the same thing about vaccines

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