Do you have a cat at home? if so, then you should read this article until the end. Imagine that a woman from Ohio says she went blind after her cat licked her face, giving her a potentially dangerous infection! Lighting in this article ...
Janese Walters from Toledo woke up one day and could not see with her left eye anymore. She suddenly woke up blind. Ignoring the cause of her sudden blindness, the distraught woman went to the hospital for a diagnosis that revealed the unthinkable: Her cat was responsible for his condition!
The curse of cats:
"I looked at myself in the mirror and thought I had a pink eye, or something ," Walters said. "I went to the doctors and they could not understand for a while what it was."
For more than a month, doctors were baffled by the condition, but eventually attributed the woman's sudden blindness to one thing: her cat. They discovered that she had something called "cat scratch" .
Cat-scratch disease is a bacterial infection that is spread by kittens and cats, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . The disease can be transmitted when a cat licks a person's open wound, or scratches or bites a person hard enough to break the skin.
The most distressing is that Walters has stated that his vision loss is apparently non-reversible. Discover more about this rare disease in the second part of this article ...
Here is how this disease spreads and what is the risk rate for cat lovers:
"It's a big handicap, there are a lot of things you have to do differently," Walters reported on his condition. She said that she knew nothing about the infection before her diagnosis, but she is lucky that the bacteria did not transfer to her other eye.
Doctors say that infection can be prevented by washing hands after contact with cats. But, according to the CDC, the rare infection could cause serious complications affecting the brain, eyes, heart or other internal organs.
What do we know about this disease?
At the University of Toledo, doctor Kristopher Brickman said that the infection can spread through anything that is exposed to the cat's mouth, such as saliva
or even fur.
He said that 40% of cats carry the disease and, according to the CDC, the infection is more likely to occur in people with weakened immune systems and children under 5 years of age. Kittens under one year old are more likely to carry the bacteria and spread it to people.
Walters said her experience has not stopped her from loving and owning pets, but she wants her experience to be a warning to others.
- "It's really important for me to spread this message," she says. "I do not want other people to lose their sight because of lack of vigilance or ignorance".