https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2024/08/21/innovationrx-covid-may-be-causing-mental-illness-and-rewiring-our-brains/
But as two new studies published in the past week show, severe COVID isn’t the only risk faced by those with the disease. New findings in JAMA Psychiatry find that levels of mental illness such as depression, anxiety and self-harm are elevated after a COVID-19 diagnosis. Additionally, a new study published in Scientific Reports found that patients who lost their sense of smell after a COVID infection saw long-term structural changes to their brains as well as a tendency to more impulsive behaviors.
What! Wow. I didn't know that, you're telling me now for the first time.
COVID is genuinely doing to humans what toxoplasmosis does to
catsmice. Love that for us.Edit: I was sleepy and wrote cats instead of mice
To mice, it rewires their brains so they spend more time in dangerous places and are more likely to get eaten. It's a good strategy that unironically will make covid spread more. Not that it's had long enough to develop that as a specific "strategy" insofar as evolution "strategizes", it just stumbled upon it.
I've read it destroys their natural aversion to the smell of predator urine, too.
Actually I just read an article today talking about toxoplasmosis and it seems, according to more recent research, that it can also cause infected people to act more impulsively
Cw: weapons grade bazinga.
After it was discovered that Toxoplasmosis makes people more impulsive there was a slew of articles about how it's actually great that humans are so ubiquitously infected with a brain-altering parasite! See, it makes them more likely to *make risky investments and cause the line to go up!
A common parasite can make people more entrepreneurial
Toxoplasmosis makes you a better investor
The final boss of capitalism is just an engorged toxoplasmosis parasite in a wall st. closet.
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Not to be pedantic but it doesn't really effect cats. Cats are the primary host and a major part of its lifecyle, but it really only effects the intermediate hosts like mice and people as far as behavioral changes and pathology.
I meant mice but wrote cats because I’m stupid
It'd be funny if the problem of late-capitalist isolation and alienation was solved by COVID evolving to make people hyper social.