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Pregnancy
peril from cats is exaggerated
Felines
were long thought to pose a high risk of transmitting toxoplasmosis, but
that has been disproven.
By
Denise Flaim
Newsday
February 21, 2005
The woman called with a bittersweet announcement.
The good news: She was pregnant. The bad news: She was returning the
kitten
she had bought from Joan Bernstein, who breeds Tonkinese cats in Center
Moriches, N.Y.
Along with admonitions to avoid alcohol and hot tubs, pregnant women are
always warned about contact with cats, because of the concern that
feline feces
can transmit toxoplasmosis.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than
60
million Americans carry the Toxoplasma gondii parasite. Those with
healthy
immune systems often do not notice, exhibiting mild flu-like symptoms or
none at
all.
But an active toxoplasma infection during pregnancy can cause blindness
and
brain damage in the unborn infant, as well as stillbirth or preterm
labor.
Bernstein told her caller that there was no need for her to part with
the
cat if she followed a few simple precautions: Wear a surgical mask and
gloves
when cleaning the litter box, or, better yet, have her husband do it.
Although the current conventional wisdom among doctors is that pregnant
women who take adequate precautions against toxoplasmosis need not give
up their
cats, some women still get that unfortunate message.
And some experts go so far as to say that cats have been unfairly
singled
out for spreading this highly infectious disease, when in fact they
carry
little blame.
"The chance of a pregnant woman catching toxoplasmosis from her cat
is
extremely rare," says veterinarian James Richards, director of the
Feline Health
Center at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University in
Ithaca,
N.Y.
As proof, he points to a study done in six European cities and published
in
the July 2000 issue of the British Medical Journal. It found, he says,
"no
association between toxoplasmosis and having a cat, litter box cleaning
or
having a cat that hunts."
Instead, the study concluded that the main risk factors for acute
toxoplasmosis infection were eating undercooked lamb, beef or game (30%
to 63% of
infections), contact with soil (6% to 17%), and travel outside Europe
and North
America. "Contact with cats," the study concluded, "was
not a risk factor."
But many doctors still focus on them. A report in the December issue of
Contemporary OB/GYN magazine found that of the 1,459 doctors responding,
1,364
advised that their cat-owning patients not clean the litter box. But
only 1,101
mentioned avoiding raw or undercooked meat, and only 888 recommended
gloves
for gardening — even though those activities represented a greater
risk of
infection.
Feline scapegoating started, Richards explains, when "it was discovered
that
cats shed infectious stages of toxoplasmosis in their stool. It's from that
that all this fear arose."
Cats can become infected with toxoplasmosis by eating or licking cat
feces
that contain the parasite egg, or oocyst.
But Richards says that scenario is "unlikely" and suggests that
predation —
killing and eating infected mice, birds and other small animals — is
the main
way cats get infected. So keeping a cat indoors dramatically cuts down
the
risk of transmission.
Even then, the window for passing the disease on to humans is a
relatively
small one.
"Once cats are infected, they will for a short period shed these
toxo-organisms in their stool — maybe for a week or two,"
Richards explains. "And the
instant they are shed, they are not infectious. They have to mature for
a day
or more before they are."
Which means that frequent cleaning and scooping of a litter box — always
with gloves if a woman is pregnant — lowers the negligible risk even
further.
Casual contact with an infected cat is not considered particularly
risky, as
the parasite is not usually carried on the fur. |
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