Parasites in the body turn a person into a businessman

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The English-language portal inews posted news in which the parasite Toxoplasma gondii is causing business acumen. Researchers have found that this simplest parasite, spread by cats, makes people behave in more adventurous ways. In fact, this parasite pushes people to do business and not be afraid to take risks and make lucrative deals.

Using saliva analysis for toxoplasmosis, they found that adults who tested positive were 1.8 times more likely to start a business than those who did not. By the way, students with the parasite were 1, 4 times more likely to choose business as their main subject and 1, 7 times more likely to specialize in entrepreneurship than in other areas of knowledge.

Previous research has shown that a parasite that tends to inhabit the brain can also inhabit any part of the body, increasing the risk of car accidents, neuroticism, and suicide.

Therefore, lead author Stephanie Johnson of the University of Colorado was not surprised by the results of her own research, although the idea that a parasite can change human behavior to such an extent sounded pretty wild.

Increased risk appetite can be traced back to an extraordinary evolutionary mechanism. Toxoplasma can only reproduce in cats, and therefore, when germs break out, they must return to another cat. How do they do it? They infect mice, which are then eaten by cats. And they increase the likelihood that this will happen by making the mice they live in are less afraid and take more risks - for example, by appearing in front of a cat.

Toxoplasmosis infection rate of 8.7 percent in the UK puts it among the countries with a relatively low level of entrepreneurship at 5.5 percent.

In contrast, in the United States, where a fifth of the population has toxoplasmosis, nearly one in ten of the working population can be classified as an entrepreneur.

Toxoplasmosis is spread through direct contact with infected cats or from eating contaminated meat or vegetables that have not eaten. If it gets into your body, it will take weeks or even months for flu-like symptoms to appear, after which the parasite will covertly remain in your body for life.

If you have symptoms, they usually go away on their own within about 6 weeks. Most people do not understand at all what they had.

The infection is usually harmless. However, if symptoms appear during pregnancy, toxoplasmosis can cause miscarriage and can also lead to problems if it spreads to the baby.

Toxoplasmosis also weakens a person's immune system, similar to HIV infection or chemotherapy, experts say.