Is latent Toxoplasmosis worth doing something about?

Is there any research on whether curing the infection actually undoes the damage?

http://www.davidbrin.com/givingplague.htm

That is all.

My wife got a routine test for toxo during her first pregnancy, and we had a bit of a scare when that came back positive; she needed an amnio, months of antibiotics, regular monitoring. Of course being French we already had a high base rate, but we were also cat people back then.

Just how large are those statistically significant effects, would be my first question. How well replicated the studies, my second. I wouldn't bother doing much about something that is small or somewhat anecdotal.

I did a lot of research into this, and the answer is sadly no. There is no good, safe treatment for toxoplasmosis. The current best treatment is simulataneous dosing of two ultra-strong antibiotics for two months. Such a course wreaks havoc on the body, and is properly only recommended in severely immuno-compromised individuals (late-stage HIV, etc.).

Obviously some or all these may be due to unobserved 3rd causes.

Cat people vs. dog people?

According to Peter Watt's blog toxoplasmosis doesn't actually reduce fear in rats, but instead causes the odor of cat urine to activate sexual arousal pathways as well as fear pathways. The overall effect causes them to approach the smell of cat urine.

Phenotype screens off genotype, as the genetic saying goes. Infection reduces Openness? Well, do you have some reason to want to increase your Openness? (Are you also looking into acquiring some psilocybin, which might actually be cheaper than treatment if Morendil is generalizable about it taking 'months' ?)

Slower reactions - would that significantly improve your life? I'm a cat person so I may be infected, but I can't say I often think (outside of taekwondo) 'I wish I had 10% faster reflexes!'

The greater jealousy thing may be an issue.

Depending on the cost, it at least seems to be worth knowing about. If one doesn't have it then one can be assured on that point, whereas if one does have it then one at least has appropriate grounds on which to second-guess oneself.

(I have been horrified in the past by tales of {people who may or may not have inherited a dominant gene for definite early disease-related death} who all refused to be tested, thus dooming themselves to a lives of fear and uncertainty. If they were going to have entirely healthy lives then they would have lived in fear and uncertainty instead of being able to enjoy them, and if they were giong to die early then they would have lived in fear and uncertainty (and stressful, gradually-increasing denial/acceptance) rather than quickly getting used to the idea, resetting their baseline, getting their loose ends in order and living as appropriate for their expected remaining lifespan. Whether or not one does (or can do) anything about one's state doesn't change that oneself having more information about oneself can (in most circumstances?) only be helpful.)

...Their findings suggest that this microbe is particularly insidious-the changes it makes may be permanent.

To replicate, Toxoplasma must invade a cell. Stanford parasitologist John C. Boothroyd has dubbed this process "kiss and spit." The parasite first attaches to the host cell (the kiss) and then releases an arsenal of foreign proteins into that cell (the spit). Toxoplasma then enters the host cell, and the injected proteins help it redecorate its new home. The parasite's first act is establishing a protective bubble in which it can divide in peace without attacks from host cell proteins. (Later, during the infection's dormant stage, these bubbles thicken to become tissue cysts.) The parasite then moves the mitochondria, which serve as the cell's powerhouses, to be adjacent to the protective bubble. It also acts on the cell's DNA, inhibiting the expression of some host genes while activating others. Finally, Toxoplasma modifies host proteins to alter their function and inhibit the immune response.

Altogether, these modifications ensure that the host cell will live a long time and supply energy to the parasite, without alerting immune cells that a parasite has moved in. Although these findings have principally been made with rodents, work with human cell cultures suggests that the same changes probably take place in the human body. In our labs, we are studying how Toxoplasma replicates and interacts with its host in an effort to develop new drugs to treat this infection.

Remarkably, a study that Boothroyd's group published in 2012 showed that Toxoplasma not only spits into the cells it invades but also spits into cells that it does not infect. This behavior-spitting proteins in passing without lingering in the cells-is a recent discovery in the microbial world. Consequently, cells that are not harboring Toxoplasma contain parasite proteins that can co-opt and reprogram that cell. In the brains of infected mice, cells that have been spat into but not invaded are even more common than ones containing parasites. This widespread scattering of proteins means Toxoplasma can affect its host at a global level, making it easier to imagine how the parasite might manipulate the activity of an entire animal. In 2013 biologist Michael Eisen of the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues found that a rodent's strange attraction to cat odors may be permanent, even if there are no longer signs of infection. In one study, Eisen exposed mice to a mutant strain of the parasite that does not appear to form brain cysts. Four months later the infected mice had no detectable parasites in the brain, yet they were still attracted to cat odors instead of repelled.

--"Common Parasite Could Manipulate Our Behavior: Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite inhabiting the brains of an estimated three billion people, could tweak its host's behavior", SciAm

More coverage: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/12/how-your-cat-is-making-you-crazy/8873/?single_page=true

Might not be so bad after all. (Personal hypothesis : however the trial was only made in New Zealand, so the parasite might not be exactly the same that in other parts of the world . I'm also wondering if the opposite effect on males and females could cancel each other out on a large scale study.)

Before reading this article, I was thinking of an "animal urine blind test" as a prediagnosis. An absence of disgust for cat urine could mean you're likely to be infected (however, in this article, the monkey were the natural prey of Leopard whereas humans in western regions are obviously not cat's preys). What do you think of it ? Any testimonies from people who know whether they are infected or not ? (I realize it's not very useful, because there is no good way to get rid of Latent Toxoplasmis and because it's probably not a very big deal. I wanted to do this mostly out of curiosity and my main interest is to know whether it could be a real instrument of diagnosis)

http://www.doctortipster.com/10789-recent-study-links-t-gondii-parasite-to-suicidal-attempts.html

It would be a mistake to assume that worthwhile tests and treatments are available.

Prevention usually has better bang for the buck for things like this.