Often pet microbes are transient (so they just pass through your system) but there are quite a few that aren’t - such as with some of the common bugs listed in that paper (such as H Pylori, which is a class 1 carcinogen).

This is why I think it’s important to make sure our pets diets are just as healthy (and species appropriate) as our own - if we have unhealthy pets in the family they will harbour bad microbes, and keep infecting us (and vice versa if we’re not healthy).

I haven’t read the article in question, but one particular parasite that cats have that “harms” humans are Toxoplasmosis. It’s wants to live in mice but breed in cats. In order to accomplish this, it makes the mice seek out cats, to then be eaten. It does this by altering the mice brain chemistry. If humans get Toxoplasmosis, we tend to become very fond of cats, which is where you see “Crazy cat ladies”.

Ah yes Toxoplasmosis! I’m sure I read once that it makes people (and mice, obviously) oblivious to danger!

I sometimes wonder whether I may have picked it up because I am the sort of person that will speak to anyone!

In fact I can only recall of one occasion when I didn’t feel that way. Going in to the sauna in my local gym one day, there was a man already in there and my instincts were telling me not to speak to him (maybe I was just grumpy that day?) anyway I laid down on the top bench as I normally do (as you get a more equal distribution of heat that way) and I could hear this weird rustling noise. You can imagine my shock when, after 15 minutes I had to get up to have a sip of my water, he was erm, I’ll leave that to your imagination! (I am not a prude and if he was just sitting there naked I wouldn’t have minded at all.)

(So maybe I don’t have Toxoplasmosis after all, as my instincts kicked in and told me to be wary in that situation!)

Here’s a funny story - a friend of mine and I went up the mountains round here one day and because we left it a bit late it started to get dark and cold and so we decided to cut through a forest as a short-cut to get home. Anyway while walking through the forest I spotted a fire, and I thought great, people are camping and I can have a warm in their fire! So we get to the fire and there’s a man there all by himself. He has these huge knives and an axe and a big rucksack with who knows what in. But there’s me asking is it ok for us to have a warm on his fire - and proceeding to chuck his logs on there to make the fire bigger! Well I was cold!

Good job my friend is a big rugby player type and we had his dog with us and he was joking on the way back that he could have been an axe murdered - the funny thing is even if I was on my own I still probably would have done the same!

(I’m over-dramatising things a bit - he was actually a nice fella and all of his kit looked pretty new/decent, so I guess he was into camping/the outdoors etc).

Maybe we need a thread for funny stories