We've been watching films like The Invasion of the Body Thieves or The Faculty for years, where beings from another world invade the human body and make it little more than a wicked sheath empty of intellect and full of bad ideas. But could it be the case that this crazy plot was not so foolish and there really is a parasite capable of causing someone to take their own lives?
Toxoplasma gondii, the parasite that can make you take your life
Humans pride ourselves on our brains. But what happens when these do not work correctly? Can they lead us to commit a thousand follies while we believe that we are really sane?
And this is where the most interesting parasite on the face of the Earth, Toxoplasma gondii, comes into play. These unicellular protozoa live in the guts of cats producing eggs as cells capable of finding the way out to enter other animals when they come into contact.
Then, when they locate a new host, this parasite changes and migrates and can even settle in the brain of the other creature. And this is when the fun comes.
The peculiarities of the Toxoplasma gondii parasite
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This parasite can only continue its life cycle if it is able to find its way to the belly of a cat. What is the simplest way? Being eaten by a feline. And curiously and incredibly, Toxoplasma gondii has evolved to cause something like this to happen.
One of the most incredible discoveries has been made to verify that it is even capable of altering the behavior of rats by infecting them with surgical precision. Thus, the animal loses its fear of feline odor by inhibiting its cerebral neurochemical pathways.
Now, given that one third of the world population carries Toxoplasma in our brain, would it be possible for it to act on a human being as it does on rats, even though our mechanisms are larger and more complex?
Thus, scientists are investigating and the results are more worrisome than a priori thought. In 2003, Dr. E. Fuller Torrey demonstrated that women with high levels of parasites were more likely to suffer from schizophrenia.
More works on human parasites
By continuing these works, a relationship between suicide and parasitic infections has been discovered. That is, if you have many of these Toxoplasmas in your brain, your chances of suicide could be very high, although the connections to this study are still weak.
But after an investigation among 45 thousand Danish women it was discovered that of those infected with Toxoplasma, 54% were prone to violent suicide. So it could be concluded that this parasite could be considered as having a great influence on our personality, making us more neurotic and prone to self-violence. Although at the moment we can only say that there is a coincidence, not a causality.
We'll see when there's more data ...