Here’s a narrative from Science Alert that may make you suppose twice about petting that stray cat you encounter on the road. This cat carried some nasty micro organism in its mouth.
A abstract:
In the United Kingdom, a 48-year-old who was bit by a stray feline ended up contracting a species of bacterium that scientists have by no means seen earlier than.
His immune response to the international microorganism was a doozy. Just eight hours after receiving a number of bites, the person’s palms had swollen to such an incredible extent that he took himself to the emergency division.
His puncture wounds have been cleaned and dressed and he was given a tetanus shot earlier than being despatched on his means with antibiotics.
A day later, he was again on the hospital. His pinky and center fingers on his left hand have been painfully enlarged and each his forearms have been crimson and swollen.
Doctors needed to surgically take away the broken tissue round his wounds. He was additionally given three completely different antibiotics intravenously and was despatched home with oral antibiotics.
This time, fortunately, the therapy labored and he made a full restoration.
The results of the chunk (see the paper here):
More:
Back on the hospital, nevertheless, medical doctors have been busy attempting to determine what had occurred. When they analyzed the microorganisms current in samples from his wounds, they discovered an unrecognizable Streptococcus-like organism.
Streptococcus is a genus of gram-positive micro organism that’s linked to meningitis, strep throat, bacterial pneumonia, and pink eye, amongst many different illnesses.
But when researchers sequenced a part of this bacterium’s genome, it didn’t match any strains on file. This was a brand new germ that scientists had by no means formally documented.
As it seems, the bacterium belongs to a different genus of gram-positive micro organism known as Globicatella.
Full genome sequencing of the bacterium means that it differs from different associated strains, like G. sulfidfaciens, by round 20 p.c, indicating a “distinct and previously undescribed species”.
Because G. sulfidifaciens is immune to a number of frequent kinds of antibiotics, it could show tough to eradicate from the physique. Thankfully, the brand new pressure found within the UK responded properly to a minimum of some antibiotics, however the story holds a warning for the general public.
“This report highlights the role of cats as reservoirs of as yet undiscovered bacterial species that have human pathogenic potential,” the authors of the case examine write.
The lesson: be cautious about petting cats you don’t know.
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From Bored Panda now we have 50 humorous cat photographs from an Instagram account. Click to see all of them; I’ll present just a few.
The supply:
The Instagram account @happycat318 does a extremely good job of capturing [cats’] mischievous methods.
It shares memes about our feline mates being hellbent on world domination, and judging from the content material, it’s solely a matter of time earlier than they get all of the catnip they crave.
And eight examples:
I think this cat is Gli, the well-known resident cat in Istanbul’s Hagia Sofia. I, too, met Gli, and fed him (see under):
Here’s me feeding Gli within the Hagia Sofia in 2008 (in Turkey I at all times carry a field of dry cat meals in my daypack):
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This NYT article critiques a cat e book, The Truth About Max, by Alice and Martin Provensen, a beforehand unpublished e book that got here out just some days in the past. If the article is paywalled, I discovered it archived here. I’ve put some illustrations from the NYT within the textual content; these drawings are courtesy of Alice and Martin Provensen.
An excerpt:
Alice and Martin Provensen have been the American image e book’s Ginger and Fred: a supremely poised and trendy illustrator workforce who, in a collaboration that spanned practically 40 years and greater than 40 kids’s books (19 of which additionally they wrote and edited), beguiled followers with their deadpan wit, far-flung curiosity and midcentury-modernist aptitude.
“The Truth About Max,” with a giant, brassy cat as its protagonist, is a beforehand unpublished image e book that was found within the type of a dummy, or preliminary model, in 2019 amongst some papers held onto by Alice’s agent George Nicholson, who died in 2015. Martin Provensen had died in 1987; Alice died in 2018.
Over the years, the couple had come to understand as people most of the animals residing of their midst and, in a sequence of droll, sketchbook-style volumes, had proved themselves to be canny naturalist-observers. In “Our Animal Friends” (1974), the primary of those books, they gave the true Max satisfaction of place by depicting him on the title web page with burning shiny eyes and an ear-to-ear grin. The e book they left behind was clearly meant to be the star flip they felt their farm’s arch-rascal had earned.
The Provensens’ love for animals, like Beatrix Potter’s, was pointedly unsentimental. In “The Truth About Max,” the reality they file consists of Max’s bad-cat excessive jinks and his uncooked knack for survival: his unfailing intuition for understanding who on two legs or 4 could be trifled with and who’s to not be crossed.
The Max we meet can be fairly the hunter, with sleeping quarters that resemble a trophy room “full of squirrel tails.” This informal, and stunning, revelation is sufficient to make younger readers really feel they’re being handled like grown-ups — one other Provensen hallmark.
The illustrations differ of their diploma of end, with the occasional determine or face merely roughed in and the backdrop left sketchy for later. A writer’s be aware states that the spidery, faux-naïve cursive used for the textual content is a redo by expert calligraphers of the artists’ personal place-holder hand-lettering.
. . . The unpolished bits inform a fact of their very own, exposing traces of the awkward, trial-and-error not-knowing wherein inventive work so typically has its beginnings.
Max was another kindred spirit. His story ends on one other decidedly grown-up be aware, this one hauntingly lovely.
Every night, we study, Max, having “tired” of the barnyard, “walks down the lane,/ into the fields./ You would not know him./ He looks like a tiger.”
On his personal, simply what threshold has he crossed? Perhaps the mysterious one which marks the restrict of what anybody can learn about anybody else. “Now,” write the Provensens, leaving us to think about the remaining, Max’s “real life begins.”
The critiques on the Amazon web site (hyperlink above) are excellent, and this may be a very good Christmas stocking stuffer for an ailurophilic little one.
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Lagniappe: A pleasant cat interrupts a BBC reporter. Click on the screenshot to go to the positioning and see the video. Here are the BBC’s notes:
This is the second a cat stole the limelight from a BBC reporter throughout a dwell broadcast from Manchester.
As Dave Guest was reporting for BBC Breakfast on individuals being inspired to remodel alleyways into “ginnel gardens”, the feline ran out of nowhere and jumped onto the bench he was sitting on.
h/t: Ginger Okay., Jez
