Cats Wrongfully Accused

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31375, 22 May 1967, Page 3

Cats Wrongfully Accused

(N.Z. Press Association)

DUNEDIN, May 21. Countless family cats have probably been wrongfully accused of passing ringworm to a member of the household and condemned to death.

Cats’ traditional prey, rats and mice, were just as likely to be responsible for the ringworm, Associate Professor Mary J. Marples, of Dunedin, suggests in the latest “New Zealand Medical Journal.”

Dr. Marples will retire this month from the microbiology department of the University of Otago Medical School. There was a tendency to in-

criminate the cat as the source of all ringworms affecting humans, she said. This resulted in the wide-

spread slaughter of many healthy domestic pets, regardless of the fact that they were neither the source nor the carriers of the diseaseproducing organism. The results of her survey of non-domestic animals in New Zealand and ’’in Rarotonga suggested that a considerable proportion of rats and mice in this country and perhaps also in the islands of Oceania, were carriers of fungi transmissable to man. When ringworm occurred in a household the family cat should be spared, at least, until the agent of the infection had been determined.

Dr. Marples said it had been known for some years that non-domestic, as well as domestic animals, could harbour fungal species involved in causing human ringworms.

Her own research had shown that more than 40 per cent of hedgehogs were infected with a recognisable ringworm-producing organism.