Toxoplasmosis

Toxoplasmosis is the medical reason for keeping cats out of your garden, specifically because of the risk associated with their feces.

Everyone gets annoyed with the smell of cat poo in their garden, or when they step in it, or when the grass cutter picks it up and spits it out all over the place. However there is a serious medical condition that is associated with cat poo, called toxoplasmosis. There are several reasons that residents may wish to keep cats out of their gardens, but one of the most important reasons is paradoxically not at the top of the list of reasons why; health of family should be the prime reason, ever before the health of the garden plants! The health danger associated with cats is Toxoplasmosis, and the good news is that by simply excluding cats from the garden this danger can be eliminated.

What is Toxoplasmosis?

Toxoplasmosis

Toxoplasmosis is caused by a parasite that is capable of infecting almost all warm blooded animals, even humans, but it is most widely recognised as being present in the common family cat. Transfer from cat to human is the most common route to human infection, and this occurs largely through fecal contamination of the hands. What this means, is that gardeners can become infected through touching cat poo (fecal contamination) from simply cleaning the lawn mower of grass, weeding, or simply plant care. Children can become infected simply from playing in areas that cats may have visited. It is for this reason that it is important to keep your garden areas free of cats, and the toxoplasmosis parasite.

The discovery of parasitic cysts in the eye of a child made the headlines when toxoplasmosis was identified as the cause. This lead to a major upsurge in families looking for ways to keep cats out of their property. At that time chemical cat repellents were the only commercial solution, however since then many options have become available, notably ultrasonic cat repellents and water jet cat repellents.

Toxoplasmosis is not a rare infection, in the UK alone it is estimated that infection levels can be as high as 350,000 each year. In the USA, i to one quarter of the population could be infected at any one time. These high levels of infection can be avoided through good hygiene, which starts at home with keeping cats out of the garden.

With such high infection levels, you might be wondering why we don’t hear more about this horrible parasite. In reality, for most healthy people, this infection can lead to nothing more than mild illness, with flu like symptoms. However adults with a reduced immune system, or otherwise unwell, can be hit more severely and in the worst cases, this can result in death.

This kind of puts things into perspective when we consider that a $50 cat repellent can make a huge difference in avoiding this infection.

Further toxoplasmosis reading : wikipedia.