Think of your biggest fear. What makes your skin crawl, your blood curdle and your eyes narrow in cautious appraisal?Whatever you fear the most — drowning, spiders, public speaking — it’s safe to say you would do all you could to stay away from it.You might not be actively working against your fear, but I’ll guess you’re not shoving fire hoses and black widows down your throat while giving platform speeches on overdrawn metaphors.I’ve never talked to a rat before, but I imagine they are terrified of cats and will go out of their way to avoid them.But, when rats are infected with a parasitic protozoan called Toxoplasmosis Gondii, they will actually seek out their predators. After being eaten, the parasite will move from the cat’s feces to more rats. This is all part of the pathogen’s life cycle, according to a 2000 Oxford study.As the geeky grandson of a holocaust survivor, my two biggest fears are fires and zombie invasions.What I’ve already told you about toxoplasmosis is frightening because it moves the chance of a zombie outbreak from “busted” to “plausible” on the Mythbusters scale of terror. A single-celled organism can make animals march happily into the jaws of their greatest enemy.That’s only a short lumber away from making people want to crawl over a barricade and take a big bite out of my jugular vein. Also, the zombies could be on fire.But the horror doesn’t end there. In fact, it’s just getting started. It turns out toxoplasmosis — besides making rodents suicidal — can dramatically affect human personality traits.When a man is infected, his intelligence is lowered, his attention span shortens, he becomes more anti-social and morose and women find him less attractive.Sticking with cat metaphors, men with the parasite “behave like alley cats,” according to an Australian researcher.”On the other hand, infected women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls,”according to Dr. Nicky Boulter of the Sydney University of Technology.In other words, infected women are “sex kittens,” according to a Wikipedia article that I may have just edited.Humans can contract the disease by handling feline fecal matter or eating undercooked meat, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.As a man, I risk becoming a stupid, suspicious risk taker. If I were a girl, I would become a canny, charming cuddle-whore. This might look slightly bleaker to me than it does for women.But there are downsides for the women, too.The infected also have slower reaction times and are 2.7 times more likely to die in a car accident. It is estimated that the disease indirectly kills 1 million people a year, according to a 2001 study by Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in Prague.Unlike Al Gore, I’m not getting in a tizzy over a terrible world that might come to fruition if I don’t keep the litter at bay, vote the right way and hang out with hippies on Earth Day.Toxoplasmosis is a real disease that has already infected 33.1 percent of America, 22 percent of Britain, and, rather humorously, 88 percent of France. Worldwide, the number is about 40 percent, according to the CDC.Many of your friends are probably infected. A portion of your family is possibly infected. There’s a very real chance you are infected.That’s terrifying.I’m going to go test my reflexes by playing Tetris for a couple of hours. I hope that’s not considered anti-social.–Contact Daniel Morgan at [email protected]