Newsbites (Page 2)

Joining the brew-ha-ha

PHOTO: Patrick Fok

What's the best way to beat the winter blahs? For some, it's a winter holiday, but for those on student budgets, it's a return to the open air pub days of summer. So what if it's well below freezing -- just lower the tent flaps and crank up the heat and the music!

The first ever Snow-Air Pub held on lower campus from January 8-12 gave students a chance to catch up with friends after the Christmas break while enjoying a beer and a bite to eat in a unique environment. A student poll in the McGill Tribune produced a unanimous verdict: Snow-AP rocks!

Do bugs make you buggy?

	ILLUSTRATION: Mark Lamarre

Tracking mud (or worse) on the carpets, chowing down uninvited on leftovers, barking or meowing a pre-dawn reveille -- pets can make you crazy. But according to E. Fuller Torrey, MDCM'63, it's possible that pets really can make you crazy. In a recent article in Lingua Franca magazine, writer Stephen Mihm talked to Torrey about his theory that domestic cats may carry infectious diseases that cause schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Torrey, a psychiatry professor at the Uniformed Services University of Health Science in Maryland, insists that he likes cats, in spite of his anti-Fluffy ideas. "My wife thinks I'm going to be assassinated by cat owners," he told Mihm. He may joke, but Torrey's very serious about his cat-related research and he knows how cruel a disease schizophrenia can be. His sister Barbara was diagnosed with it just as she was due to start university.

Although schizophrenia affects only 1% of the population, it's an illness that's devastating for those afflicted and their families. Patients can be treated with medication, but relapses are heartbreakingly common and approximately 40% of sufferers end up on the streets or in prison. Many commit suicide.

The germ theory of mental illness was posited as early as the mid-1800s. The idea was lent credence by the outbreak of psychoses after the 1918 influenza epidemic and the discovery that syphilis could cause dementia. But the profession of psychiatry gradually put most of its eggs in the Freudian basket, moving away from biological causes as the basis for mental illness.

Thirty years ago, Torrey first suggested that Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite passed to cats from rodents, caused brain lesions in humans -- and possibly schizophrenia. At the time, he told Lingua Franca, the idea was "considered psychotic." Since then he and Johns Hopkins virologist Robert Yolken have uncovered evidence to support the claim and are about to begin clinical drug trials using antibiotics and antivirals similar to those used by AIDS patients. Yolken says that most humans exposed to toxoplasma (usually through cat feces) suffer no ill effects, but the parasite poses a danger to people with compromised immune systems and to pregnant women and their fetuses.

Whether Torrey's theory is correct, it does help to broaden studies into mental illness. Recent proof that a bacteria, not a personality type, causes most gastric ulcers, and the discovery of intriguing links between some strep infections and obsessive-compulsive disorder may mean that other conditions are also germ-based.

In the future, psychiatrists may rely more on antibiotics than analysis when treating their patients.

See the full article, Pet Theory: Do Cats Cause Schizophrenia?