Since I work with cats and have two of my own, I thought I’d pass on what I learned about Toxoplasmosis. (Toxo is what you could potentially catch from a kitty litter box – not harmful to adults, but dangerous to a fetus.) A few select people will try to tell you that cats aren’t safe to be around while pregnant and you need to get rid of your cat. That’s simply not true. (No animal is 100% safe with a baby, obviously, but that’s another issue!)<\/p>\n
When it comes to being pregnant around cats the simplest way to avoid any problems is to get someone else to scoop the kitty litter box. And if you have no one else, use gloves. Also use gloves when gardening, as not everyone keeps their cats indoors and gardens are frequently seen as large, free kitty litter boxes for them.<\/p>\n
Here’s some other factoids that might make you feel safer:<\/p>\n
Cats get toxoplasmosis from eating raw meat… ie, rodents, birds. If your cats never get outside the chance of them getting it is pretty slim (unless you have mice in your house). They (and you) can also get toxo from raw meat from the butcher… this is the same reason they recommend eating all meat at least medium-well when you’re pregnant.<\/p>\n
The parasite in a cat’s feces takes 24 hours to become infectious. So litter boxes are only dangerous if they aren’t scooped daily.<\/p>\n
Cats will only be infectious for several weeks after the initial infection.<\/p>\n
You get infected by ingesting it – ie, touching your face after touching feces.<\/p>\n
What does this mean? If your cat has been indoor only for at least a few months, isn’t fed raw meat, and the litter boxes are scooped daily there is little to no risk. Of course most doctors will advise you to get someone else to scoop the boxes just in case.<\/p>\n
In my case I’m going to not be touching the kitty litter boxes at work once I’m pregnant, since we do have new cats come in once in a while and their origins are sometimes unknown. Here at home I’m going to attempt to convince Den to scoop the boxes, but I can just see the whining coming from that one… we’ll see how it goes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Since I work with cats and have two of my own, I thought I’d pass on what I learned about Toxoplasmosis. (Toxo is what you could potentially catch from a kitty litter box – not harmful to adults, but dangerous to a fetus.) A few select people will try to tell you that cats aren’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[15],"class_list":["post-631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-pregnancy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}