From yesterday's FML:
>for fighting animals, I have heard that putting Vicks Vaporub on their
>noses works really well, because everyone smells the same. maybe a
>bath for everybody and then the rub on afterwards is a good idea for
>integration sessions?
This has been all over the press; a search on Google News for the last
month or so will find you many articles. A study was done on ferrets
because it was noticed that infants and toddlers who had it put on them
developed serious, sometimes life threatening respiratory inflammation
and difficulty dislodging mucus. In the study, the ferrets developed
the same sort of inflammation.
That info WAS recently on a number of ferret lists, including the FML
and FHL.
Abstract:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez
News stories (just a few of them):
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-01-13-vicks-vaporub_N.htm
which describes what the result can look like:
>Only 18 months old, the girl struggled to breathe as her grandparents
>looked on in the emergency department. Pneumonia and asthma were the
>likely culprits, but she didn't respond to treatment. Her doctors and
>grandparents racked their brains for an explanation.
>Finally, the grandparents mentioned that because she had appeared to
>have a cold, "we put Vicks (VapoRub) right under her nose. ... Could
>that be it?"
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/135298.phphttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28628924/
and there are thousands more
Ferrets are often used to study human respiratory things because they
parallel the human situation very closely for many of those things,
especially for young humans for some subsets.
Want to keep the ferrets' respiratory systems from having the risk of
developing an acute and scary problem? Avoid the Vicks VapoRub. Not
all may develop the problem, but why risk a ferret that way?
Sukie (not a vet)
Recommended ferret health links:
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/http://ferrethealth.org/archive/http://www.afip.org/ferrets/index.htmlhttp://www.miamiferret.org/fhc/http://www.ferretcongress.org/http://www.trifl.org/index.shtmlhttp://homepage.mac.com/sukie/sukiesferretlinks.html
[Posted in FML 6234]
