For all you cat lovers, know that keeping your cats indoors is a lot safer than outdoors, as reported by scientists. They say that pet cats who are often brought outdoors are more likely to be infected with parasites and pathogens than those who stay indoors. This report was made by the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. This becomes a problems for people who own cats too, as cats can transmit some of these diseases to their human parents as well.
If the cats are far from their houses and tend to spend more time in the open, they're more likely to be troubled by a bug or virus.
Says the lead author Kayleigh Chalkowski, a researcher at the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences at Auburn University in Alabama, “Each degree in absolute latitude increased infection likelihood by four percent. You think of tropical regions as just having more wildlife, more parasites. But it turned out that latitude had the opposite effect.”
Chalkowski and colleagues studied 19 different cat pathogens in almost a dozen of countries. Chalkowski says, “This is the first time outdoor access as a risk factor for infection in cats has been quantified across a wide range of geographic locales and types of pathogens.”
They also happened to see similar effects of both feline roundworm and single-cell parasite diseases, both of which can affect humans. It stands true regardless of how they were transmitted - other cats, prey like mice or birds or even soil.
Said Chalkowski, “Basically, no matter where you are in the world, keeping your cat indoors is a great way to keep them healthy from infectious diseases. Considering that many of the pathogens cats carry can actually be spread to humans.”
Even dogs can transmit rabies and cattle carry Cryptosporidium parvum which is a parasitic disease that attacks the intestinal tract. So if you're thinking it's just cats, then no they aren't the only animal to do transmit diseases to humans.
