Letting Your Cat Out Is Risking Your Health

An average Kenyan would not encourage a cat to stay indoors, or rather in many home cats prefer to stay outside than inside.

However, study has shown that cats should stay more inside than outside. They say that pet cats allowed outdoors are nearly three times as likely to become infected with pathogens or parasites than those confined to quarters, they reported in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

“Each degree in absolute latitude increased infection likelihood by four percent,” said lead author Kayleigh Chalkowski, a researcher at the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences at Auburn University in Alabama.

“You think of tropical regions as just having more wildlife, more parasites,” she told AFP. “But it turned out that latitude had the opposite effect.”To settle the indoor-vs-outdoor question once and for all, Chalkowski and colleagues combed through nearly two dozen earlier studies in which the prevalence of one or more diseases was compared across interior and exterior environments.

So, the scientists say that having your cat roam around will attract worms, roundworms to be precise and spread it in your house that causes toxoplasmosis, both of which can affect humans. This held true regardless of how they were transmitted — whether from the soil, other cats, or prey such as mice and birds.

“Basically, no matter where you are in the world, keeping your cat indoors is a great way to keep them healthy from infectious diseases,” Chalkowski said by way of summary.

This is especially good advice, she added, “considering that many of the pathogens cats carry can actually be spread to humans”.Other domesticated animals transmit the disease to their caretakers — dogs, for examples, spread rabies, and cattle carry Cryptosporidium parvum, a parasitic disease that attacks the intestinal tract.

Wild cats were likely first drawn to human communities in search of rodents, and were domesticated some 5,000 years ago. In ancient Egypt, they were associated with gods and prominently featured in hieroglyphics.

Plan to keep your cat indoors, to avoid diseases. But then again who can control a cat? You just never know when they walk out or in, not to forget that sometimes in Kenya cats fend for themselves