Someone asked about this topic a few days ago because someone wrote to
her wondering if the kids were allergic to ferrets (A: Possibly, but it
is a rare allergy, though it can happen.) and here is a news story on the
ways parents mess up when trying to deal with their children's asthma.
Notice that not removing the actual cause is common, and that the most
common cause is parents' smoking but only 6% of parents who smoke tackle
that.  I know that when her smoking got us very sick repeatedly during
our childhoods (It was not unusual for us to have bronchitis 6 times a
year as well as long sinus infections.) my mother would believe any
alternative to avoid having to blame her cigarette addiction, and she
blamed anything else year after year.  If there had been ferrets in our
family at the time she likely would have tried to blame them so strong
was the control smoking exerted over her life despite all that it stole
from her and us.
 
http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?flok=FF-RTO-rohts&idq=/ff/
story/0002%2F20040817%2F1028559180.htm&sc=rohts
 
The sources of the article is a piece studying parental responses to
children's asthma in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology,
August 2004 with work done by the team of Dr. Michael D. Cabana of the
University of Michigan Medical System in Ann Arbor and then discussed
with a reporter at Reuters Health.
 
I was thinking just last night about how often we all tend to overlook
smoking as a source for coughs in ferrets, actually.  I think that is
because most of us here understand how badly smoke impacts ferrets so
the smokers here don't smoke inside, and the non-smokers simply avoid
smoke often enough to not think of it.  It is something that needs to
be in the check-off list when someone has a coughing ferret, though.
[Posted in FML issue 4608]