I was asked privately why the pet store worker who had two young ferrets
die mysteriously should not be interacting with the new kits which come in.
Figured maybe others may want to think about this if they don't know why,
either.
 
Think back to the early days of ECE.  People didn't know that the disease
could be spread not only by contact with infected ferrets, but contact with
their cages or the humans who had held them.  The disease spread like wild
fire.
 
Now think about last year's sudden appearance of a strain of coccidea which
was causing such massive blooms that the ferrets which contracted it almost
all died.  In that case once people got a handle on what was happening
careful measures were taken to reduce exposure.  The upshot is that the
strain appears to possibly have died off.  Too many died (Isn't that always
the case?) -- largely because it wasn't contained well at the very start,
but think of the many thousands who were saved because precautions were
later employed.  The care saved a huge number of ferrets' lives.
 
Now, look again at the current situation: someone who works at a pet store
posted that half of a co-worker's group of ferrets (two young 2 years olds)
had died suddenly of unknown causes.  No necropsy or pathology were done
with the first ferret (though one would have hoped that those who work in
pet stores would be extra careful about unexplainable deaths due to the
chance of them infecting others), but fortunately it has been done with the
second one.  Until the results come back so that the cause is known it pays
to use extra caution.  Right now no one knows what the cause is, if it has
a long or short incubation time, if it is highly contagious, if there can
be silent carriers, or even IF IT CAN BE CARRIED AND SPREAD FROM CLOTHING.
Obviously, if this is a new strain of illness which can be transported on
clothing and the co-worker interacts with the kits then those kits can
transport the illness to multiple homes and the ferrets there.  No one
wants to see something horrible like that happen, so I advised that the
individuals whose ferrets died mysteriously behave with considerate caution
until more is known and the cause become either a reason to not interact
with other ferrets at all, or one which is not a problem.  It's just basic
health maintenance, like the way we stayed away from any ferrets beyond our
own for about a year after ECE finally hit our home.  NO one wants to be a
Typhoid Mary of ferret illness.
[Posted in FML issue 2665]