Abstract:

It is well-known that the number of people owning cats in their houses and feeding them on the streets is high. The high number of cats owned by households in Turkey in 2019 was estimated to be 3.8 million. A great number of stray cats are fed and taken care of by the neighborhood residents in all the regions of Turkey and it is almost impossible to offer an estimation about the exact number of these animals, but it is fair to say that the cumulative number is very large. The cats and the other felids are the only known definitive host of this protozoan parasite that infects most species of warm-blooded animals, including humans. In humans, acute infections with Toxoplasma gondii during pregnancy and its potentially deleterious effect on the fetus and the newborn are well known and properly considered by the obstetricians. Despite occasionally observed neurological changes, T. gondii chronic infections were usually considered largely innocuous in the otherwise healthy non pregnant patients. However, more recent studies on felids have suggested that behavioral changes are sometimes manifests during the latent infections with this parasite. Similar changes have also been reported in human beings. Hence, we reviewed reports about the central nervous system involvement in animals and human beings and suggested that it will be appropriate to consider “toxoplasmosis” in differential diagnosis while dealing with medical problems associated with behavioral changes of members of the human population in Turkey. We have; therefore, enumerated the conditions that fall into this category

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