Hello All,
Well, according to what I have read and asked about on the fml a couple of
years ago, ece is a corona virus and yes, it has been studied by a
pathologist. At one point you could send in fecal samples to Dr. Williams
for him to look at and confirm the ece, but his funding was under the Air
force at the time and he stopped accepting samples when this funding was
removed.
As I understand it, and believe me I am unfortunately fairly well versed
with corona viruses, they are very hard to replicate. Because of this, and
their mutability, it is hard to create vaccines for them. Cats deal with a
couple of corona viruses, one simply called corona virus which is a non
fatal relatively harmless virus. There is also an always fatal corona virus
call Feline Infectious Peritonitis. Fatal once the disease is active. The
cats can test positive for both diseases by having either one, so you can
get false positives and worse yet, false negatives if the cats that are FIP
carriers go into remission and stop shedding virus. It does happen. I had
in happen in my house when all cats tested negative for FIP *and* corona,
and I brought in two young kittens from a breeder. The breeder had no
history of the disease and I lost both kittens before age one. And then an
older cat started shedding virus again.
In order to test my remaining cats, I agreed to have them including in a
database on the disease which determined the genetic markers for the disease
with pcr ( a method of fastly reproducing DNA for laboratory use). All of
my cats are carriers and so no more for me until these are long gone.
I cannot recall offhand but I know the symptoms of Parvo in dogs are almost
identical to ece in ferrets and I am thinking that Parvo is also a corona
virus. But don't count on this at all.
BTW, most viruses will not cross species. The most common that do are rhino
(cold) and influenza viruses.
When my house was hit with ece, I had one ferret out of ten who became
seriously ill. He stayed ill for almost 2 months and the vet attributes
his life to my willingness to literally force feed him and hydrate him every
2 hours for over 2 weeks straight. He went from 1200 grams 610 grams. None
of the standard treatments helped him at all.
The others in the house ranged from a week of mucousy poop to a couple of
days of seedy foul smelling stuff. ECE kills off the cells lining the
intestinal track, which then hinder absorption of nutrients and also shed
off, making the stool smell like a dead animal. This is a tell tale sign
of ece, the smell. I have been able to help folks now if they are dealing
with it just by smelling poop. That is true love folks!
Vaccinations-One of the s.o.p. around here is the administration of
diphenhydramine (benadryl) approximately 10 minutes before vaccines are
given. I have done this with each and every ferret. I have never had a
reaction and I regularly give rabies and distemper vaccinations on the same
trip. I also stay at the vets for around an hour after the vaccines are
given. This has worked with both Fervac-D and with Galaxy D. And I am
talking 26 ferts here guys.
AOL-Sorry BIG guy, have to correct you on something. hehe. I think this is
a first, especially from a, gasp choke, Mac user to a computer guru. hehe.
I checked on both my AOL versions, 3.0 and 4.0. You can download the fml
into the downloads folder, then go to open file, click on it and AOL will
convert the file into text and allow you to read it online if you wish. Or
off-line with AOL. No more word processors. hehe.
Of course, I don't have a clue about windows NT, but someone might want to
try the same thing with that set up.
Maggie Mae, with target on her forehead
"when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because." e. e. cummings
[Moderator's note: The poster was using Windows 3.1 -- I don't believe it's
possible there. And if the digest is above, I think 64K(?), I don't think
it's possible at all -- but please let me know if I'm wrong. BIG]
[Posted in FML issue 2367]
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