To Pat Ball -
 
        Pat - Very little research is going on into why ferrets get tumors.
There is so little information known about what tumors they get, we ahve to
concentrate on documenting them first.
 
        Susan Erdman at MIT has been working very hard on lymphosarcoma trying
to document a causative virus - but I don't think she's isolated one yet.But for
the rest of the tumors - well, there are a lot of theories out there, such as
high sugar diets cause insulinomas and early neutering causing adrenal tumors,
but that's all they are - theories.
 
        One of the main problems is that research is expensive, and currently
there is nobody willing to fund the type of research that you are discussing -
very expensive research that requires maintianing animals for their entire lives
to waist and see if tumorss will show up and for what reason - that's about the
most expensive research there is.
 
        My current research on the Green Diarrhea (which I am renaming ECE -
Epizootic Catarrhal Enteritis of ferrets) took 18 months to get funded, and
short projects involving infectious diseases are the most inexpensive of all....
 
        Sorry about your friend's ferret - adrenal tumors are not a type of
tumor that I usually associated euthanasia with....
 
       Bruce Williams, DVM                 Department of Veterinary Pathology
       [log in to unmask]         Armed Forces Institute of Pathology
       (202) 782-2600/2602                 Washington, D.C.  20306-6000
[Posted in FML issue 1150]