Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dragonwriter 3560 days ago
> On that note, a friend of mine (unknowingly) used water he thought was clean, but that came from a glass my cat had been drinking from, to dissolve heroin for injecting. The resulting infection nearly caused him to lose his leg - the lab analysis of the wound revealed the infection was caused by cat-saliva bacteria.

> Anyway, just saying there are dangers from pets and allowing them to share your environment.

While that's true, the particular dangers from injecting cat saliva are usually pretty minor (not low harm, just low probability: you mostly run into them if you get bitten by a cat so that it draws blood, and you deal with them by treating that -- rare -- event as an emergency requiring immediate attention.)

The real danger revealed by the incident you describe is using poor cleanliness standards when injecting drugs (in this case, recreational, but that's irrelevant to the hazard, though its probably a lot more common with recreational drug use than otherwise). You don't use water that you merely "think" is clean for any purpose associated with injection, whether its cleaning anything used in the process or, worse, actually injecting.

> Although, I let my cat take bites out of my food sometimes, and that seems OK so far.

You probably shouldn't, though ingesting material contaminated with cat saliva its still probably much safer than injecting it.