Cat toys shaped like microbes

Behold, a truly fantastic gift for the cat in your life — catnip-filled soft toys shaped like amoebas, cyanobacteria, and (pictured above) giardia.

Giardia are microscopic parasites that can invade the guts of vertebrate animals, including cats and humans. Generally, you get it by ingesting giardia-infested feces. For humans, this mostly means contaminated drinking water, because giardia are harder to kill than you might think. They can survive quite happily outside of a host and are resistant to chlorine.

Blue giardia cat toy

Read more on giardia (and see pictures) at the CDC website

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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MORE: disease • gifts • gross • microbes • pets • Science

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http://twitter.com/pattihaskins pattihaskins

My cats prefer the snakes that I make them: http://www.etsy.com/shop/pattihaskins?section_id=10821378
gdendler

Giardia. It’s spread by beavers. (Really!)
bo1n6bo1n6

Reminds me of Neckface for some reason.
http://profiles.google.com/marc.k.mielke Marc Mielke

I love the little minature cat facing off against the giant bacterium.