Alex Tabarrok points me to a new paper on the effects of Toxoplasma gondii, Increased incidence of traffic accidents in Toxoplasma-infected military drivers and protective effect RhD molecule revealed by a large-scale prospective cohort study:
We confirmed, using for the first time a prospective cohort study design, increased risk of traffic accidents in Toxoplasma-infected subjects and demonstrated a strong protective effect of RhD positivity against the risk of traffic accidents posed by latent toxoplasmosis. Our results show that RhD-negative subjects with high titers of anti-Toxoplasma antibodies had a probability of a traffic accident of about 16.7%, i.e.
a more than six times higher rate than Toxoplasma-free or RhD-positive subjects.
The idea of an infection resulting in behavioral changes shouldn't be that surprising, as children we are all told about the dangers of rabies. These sorts of phenomena, whereby microorganisms hijack the behavioral phenotype of hosts shouldn't be that surprising to ...
