THE SUPERSTITIONS about black cats aren’t entirely groundless—they can
be unlucky for some poeple.
Shahzad Hussain and his colleagues at the Long Island College Hospital in New
York gave a questionnaire to 321 allergy sufferers asking them to describe their
cats and assess the severity of their symptoms. Those with dark cats were four
times as likely to have severe symptoms as people with light-coloured cats. “We
were surprised,” says Hussain. “So many questions need to be answered.” The
results will appear in Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.
