Because this sort of thing has come up a few times recently again I am
repeating an announcement from July.
 
It would also be VERY good if people kept the webpage on the bottom of
Bruce's letter in their bookmarks and passed it on to vets, as well as
http://www.ferretcentral.org (not .com which is a much later and completely
different thing) for a range of information and links including health
info, and http://www.miamiferret.org/fhc .  A good number of questions
have arisen recently which could be answered but easily, accurately, and
comfortably for people if they used these pages.  All THREE of the pages
(Ferret Central, Miami Ferret, and AFIP) give info on a wide range of
medical considerations and problems -- things everyone should have handy.
 
You will want to copy this to your vet, and will want to also go to the
webpage on the bottom and use the index to find the ECE info and copy that.
Bruce is a veterinary pathologist and has designed his pages partly for
owners but largely for vets.
 
>Subject: Coronavirus identified in ECE
>Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1999 12:53:33 -0400
 
>Sukie - thought you'd like to be the first to know, and you can post
>the info to the FML - please direct any questions to me.  Let's not
>blow this one up to big, though, because I am not announcing a
>vaccine here....
 
>Dr. Matti Kuipel at the Purdue University College of Veterinary Medicine,
>has definitively identified a coronavirus as the cause of epizootic
>catarrhal enteritis in the ferret.  Loops of gut from a number of cases of
>ECE submitted to the Purdue Diagnostic Lab stained positively for
>antibodies against a particular type of coronavirus.  These results have
>been repeated at a separate Canadian laboratory.  Another collaborator,
>Dr. Melissa Kennedy of the University of Tennessee appears to have
>isolated a primer for a restricted portion of the coronavirus genome from
>this material.
>
>I have sent material from the original work that I did with the virus in
>1994 for confirmation.
>
>We have long suspected coronavirus as the cause of ECE - the viruses were
>seen in the work done at the AFIP in 1994, and sproadically since then.
>Dr. Kuipel's persistent efforts to nail down the cause of the disease
>(which he appears to have done in elegant fashion) will "legitimize" the
>disease in the veterinary literature and hopefully will open the door for
>others to conduct additional research, isolate this agent, and produce
>rapid diagnostic tests and a vaccine.  We are currently working on
>publishing the pathology data from the entire investigation, dating back
>to 1994.
>
>Please realize that this announcement DOES NOT mean that a rapid
>diagnostic test has been developed (all tests were run on either surgical
>biopsies of the intestine or autopsy material), nor does it mean that a
>vaccine is available, nor are the researchers developing any of these
>products for the market.  However this is a vital piece of the puzzle,
>and should go far in enticing the right parties to look at the potential
>for developing these type of products.
>
>Bruce Williams, DVM, DACVP
>Chairman, Department of Telemedicine
>Armed Forces Institute of Pathology
>Washington, DC 20306-6000
>
>http://www.afip.org
 
Bruce said a MINIMUM of 8 months isolation from others when we had it here,
preferably a year and you and your ferrets should not interact with other
ferrets during that time, either.  If you absolutely have to interact with
any other ferrets then you must learn personal cleaning skills form your
vet and use different clothing and shoes (which is why they have so many
lab coats handy).  We simply isolated ourselves, the ferrets, and our home
for a year after symptoms stopped.  We introduced another into our crew
maybe a year and half or two years after it had disappeared here without
any problem at all, and recently introduced another with no problems.
[Posted in FML issue 2915]