Just on the topic of their poo (which is always a nice after dinner topic LOL) one of my male friends spent 3 months last year in bed having caught toxoplasmosis (sp?) and was basically vomiting pretty much all the time for the first 6 weeks He lost a lot of weight.

He doesn't own a cat and doesn't know how he caught it, but his doctor was sure that it had come from a cat. Another friend of mine caught it a few years ago from one of her own cats and it was a similar situation, knocked her off her feet for a few months.

You do have to be really careful. Other cats always poo in our garden and they never dig down, they often just go on the grass.. yuck.

While I have never know anyone personally who has caught anthing from cat/dog poo, I do know that our doctor strictly forbade my wife from cleaning out our previous cat's litter box while she was pregnant. He also told to to always wear surgical gloves inside her cloth gloves when gardening. We too always found "traces" of neighborhood cats laying about our flowerbeds.