Are ambition and business sense due to the parasite responsible for toxoplasmosis?

Do not worry if you have never had business acumen. It's not your fault, it's that you have not had toxoplasmosis. No it's not a joke but a serious international study published Wednesday, July 25 in the very serious British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. According to researchers, success in business, risk appetite and ambition may well come from the parasite responsible for this disease that now affects more than two billion people.

British, American, German, Spanish, Norwegian and Chinese researchers conducted salivary tests on nearly 1,500 American students. They found that those who carried the prozotary Toxoplasma gondii were 1.7 times more interested in management and entrepreneurship. Then, during other tests conducted with professionals attending entrepreneurship events, they observed that Toxoplasma gondii-positive adults had set up their own business more than the others. Finally, by aggregating data from 42 countries, scientists found that infection was an indicator of entrepreneurial intent and that people were less afraid of failure, more impulsive and ambitious. 19659004] Thus, these results highlight a "link between parasitic infection and complex human behavior, including entrepreneurship and economic productivity," note the researchers recalling that other studies had already shown the ability of Toxoplasma gondii to modify the behavior of non-human hosts to be able to reproduce more easily

How to get Toxoplasma gondii?

Indeed, in 2016, researchers from the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) had observed that Toxoplasma gondii caused its hosts to adopt risk behaviors, making them attractive to chimpanzees, for example. s the smell of lepoard's urine, their natural predator. Because it can only be reproduced in cats.

This parasite is caught especially when one consumes a poorly cooked meat or when one drinks water having been in contact with soils contaminated by cat excrements. But before throwing yourself on a Tartar steak to boost your business acumen, let's wait for further research to corroborate it.

Because, remember that if toxoplasmosis most often does not cause clinical manifestations, it can be very serious for immunocompromised people and pregnant women. Indeed, the risks of the disease for the embryo and the phoetus are considerable: hydrocephalus, mental retardation, intracranial calcifications, chorioretinitis, jaundice, and sometimes almost all organs. However, toxoplasma is dangerous in pregnant women only when they infect them for the first time and they have not yet made antibodies.