Domestic cats have long been fingered as voracious hunters, causing dozens of native-mammal extinctions in Australia alone. But the purring predators bring with them another threat to the wild, according to research published by Britain’s Royal Society: the spread of disease. Scientists at the University of British Columbia in Canada said the prevalence of toxoplasmosis, which can cause flu-like symptoms in humans and cysts in wild animals, can be traced to the world’s estimated 600 million housecats, with the incidence of disease rising among wild animals in regions where pet cats are common.
Tag: bacteria
Germ resistance to antibiotics driven partly by money – dpa international
DUBLIN — Antimicrobial or antibiotic resistance could prove “the death knell for modern medicine” and lead to an “antibiotic apocalypse,” according to England’s former chief medical officer. Ahead of this week’s European Congress on Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases, speaker Sally Davies warned of scant progress in curbing bacterial resistance to antibiotics, a growing danger that has been widely flagged in recent years. “Compared to 8 billion dollars of profit for cancer drugs, the 100 million loss for antimicrobials means that our medicine cabinets are becoming emptier – because of bankruptcies, not lack of scientific brainpower,” Davies said.