Okay, for those who are wondering why the CDC would be interested in
the category of zoonotic diseases here is some basic info, but you can
easily find more by just taking the time to do a search yourself.
 
Zoonotic diseases are diseases which animals can pass to humans (and
often vice versa), so avoiding those helps not only humans but also
the animals who can get sick.
 
Something like 60% of disease TYPES that humans get are zoonoses.  I
don't have time to look up the origin of that info right now, but I
know that I have given the URL in the past so those wanting it can hit
the archives.
 
It is thought that one reason why Native Americans had antibodies to
fewer diseases than invasive Europeans was because the people from the
"Old World" had much more daily exposure to many types of domesticated
animals.
 
Different types of animals vary a lot in the types and numbers of serious
zoonoses they can give us.  Other primates and rodents pose a far larger
hazard in terms of the range of possible serious zoonoses than ferrets in
general for instance, yet the infection rate still is usually pretty low.
As zoonotic diseases go ferrets are comparably quite safe, in fact just
in number of types of diseases more so than cats and dogs if one looks at:
http://www.provet.co.uk/health/zoonoses/Zoonoses.htm
 
http://www.anapsid.org/chomeltables.html#table1
(Note that rabbits are in the first table but are not themselves
rodents; they are lagomorphs.)
http://www.anapsid.org/chomel.html
 
One zoonotic disease which is in the news a lot these days is bird flu.
Cats and ferrets can contract the disease, and dogs with antibodies to to
have been found in a study of feral and farm dogs in Indonesia so they
might be able to be silent carriers.  Keeping these pets and pet birds
inside in areas with bird flu is the best approach at the current level
of information and available approaches because it better avoids the
risks from diseased wild birds which may be investigated, or eaten in
those affected locations.
 
In the modern world, the shipping and smuggling of animals not born in
one's own area/country for pets or for meat/bushmeat/skins is a method
by which diseases of multiple types increase their spread among humans.
Some of that importation factor was involved with the initial noticed
SARS outbreak in China, and with a Monkey Pox in rodents one in this
general part of the world a few years back.  Britain could have
encountered that with bird flu last year but their quarantine time for
imported birds caught the problem.
 
Susceptibility of humans, of course, varies among individuals and
recent research has indicated a broader difference:
http://www.muhc.ca/media/news/?ItemID=19899
on Caspase-12 which is found in around 20% of people of African
descent, and affects vulnerability.
 
If you are from a New World family which has been here for hundreds of
years and consider yourself "white", please, note that a decent number
of such "white" families appear to have had some ancestors who were
partly of other races but to not know it, which is no surprise since
slavery was for a long time imposed by "legal" means by tracing female
descent so the women who passed needed, for their children's sake, to
have their background hidden and sometimes forgotten, so you may have
a bit of African descent, even if you are a pale blonde and your
social-cultural identity is white.  A lot of people in the U.S. of
multiple racial identities have pretty well mixed up ancestry.
 
If farms, distributors, and pet stores were required to not have animals
in conditions where they are in close proximity to animals which can
cause injury to them or which can spread shared zoonotic or epizooic
(like an epidemic but among animals) then risks would be reduced.  Not
only that, but it actually would give a way to close down a number of
the most abusive small pet farm situations, so could greatly benefit
animal welfare in a way that goes beyond disease prevention.
 
Better tracing of animals by distributors would also help stem diseases
(which attack the animals, too, you know, so both animals and humans
are helped).
 
Here is a good write-up on zoonotic diseases:
http://exoticpets.about.com/od/healthandsafetyissues/f/zoonosis.htm
I think you will like part of this quoted portion:
> Examples of Zoonoses
>
> Salmonella and Reptiles
> Illegal Turtle Sales (related to Salmonella)
> Salmonella and Rodents
> Lymphocytic Choriomeningitis in Hamsters and Mice
> Tularemia in Hamsters and Other Rodents
> Monkey Pox and Prairie Dogs (and a Gambian Rat)
> Psittacosis in Birds
> Ferrets and the Flu (a bit of a reversal, as ferrets often get
> infected by people)
 
I skimmed this 1998 brochure.  It seems pretty good:
http://www.pawssf.org/graphics/education/safe_pet_guidelines.pdf
 
-- Sukie (not a vet, and not speaking for any of the below in my
private posts)
Recommended health resources to help ferrets and the people who love
them:
Ferret Health List
http://www.smartgroups.com/groups/ferrethealth
FHL Archives
http://ferrethealth.org/archive/
AFIP Ferret Pathology
http://www.afip.org/ferrets/index.html
Miamiferrets
http://www.miamiferret.org/fhc/
International Ferret Congress Critical References
http://www.ferretcongress.org
[Posted in FML issue 5237]