According to a new international study, business acumen and a taste for risk are due to a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii, responsible for toxoplasmosis.
Don’t worry if you’ve never had business acumen. It’s not your fault, it’s that you didn’t have toxoplasmosis. No it is not a joke but a serious international study published this Wednesday, July 25 in the very serious British review Proceedings of the Royal Society B. According to the researchers, success in business, a taste for risk and ambition could well come from the parasite responsible for this disease which today affects more than two billion people.
English, American, German, Spanish, Norwegian and Chinese researchers conducted saliva tests on nearly 1,500 American students. They found that those who carried the prozotarian Toxoplasma gondii were 1.7 times more interested in management and entrepreneurship. Then, during other tests carried out with professionals present at events on entrepreneurship, they observed that the adults positive for Toxoplasma gondii had set up their own business more than the others. Finally, by pooling data from 42 countries, the scientists found that infection was an indicator of entrepreneurial intention and that those affected tended to be less fearful of failure, more impulsive and ambitious.
Thus, these results highlight a “link between parasitic infection and complex human behaviors, and in particular entrepreneurship and economic productivity”, note the researchers, recalling that other studies had already shown the ability of Toxoplasma gondii to modify the behavior of non-human hosts in order to be able to reproduce more easily.
How is Toxoplasma gondii caught?
Indeed, in 2016, researchers from the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) had observed that the Toxoplasma gondii caused its hosts to adopt risky behaviors for example, by making the smell of lepoard urine, their natural predator, attractive to chimpanzees. Because it can only reproduce in felines.
This parasite is mainly caught when you eat undercooked meat or when you drink water that has been in contact with soil contaminated with cat feces. But before jumping on a steak tartare to boost your business acumen, let’s wait for additional research to corroborate this one.
Because, remember that if most often toxplasmosis does not cause clinical manifestations, it can be very serious for immunocompromised people. and pregnant women. Indeed, the risks of the disease for the embryo and the phoetus are considerable: hydrocephalus, mental retardation, intracranial calcifications, chorioretinitis, jaundice, and sometimes damage to almost all the organs. However, toxoplasma is only dangerous in pregnant women when it infects her for the first time and she has therefore not yet produced antibodies.
.
