Glenn Johnson wrote:
>Who's kidding who?  Injecting ferrets with massive doses of rabies and
>watching them die an ugly death would have went on for as long as they
>could suck up another grant dollar.  It was the growing outrage from the
>ferret people that caused the sudden about face.
 
Might want to do some reading of the back issues from around the time Kodo
was siezed.  The growing outrage of the ferret community regarding
widespread kill and test policies on ferrets were what *led to* the
clinical trials of rabies testing on ferrets last year.
 
This was done in the hopes that once the results were released, it would
eliminate the last excuse being used to refuse a quarantine recommendation
in the Compendium of Animal Rabies Control.  That last excuse was that
there was not a study done showing how bat variants of the rabies virus
behave in ferrets.  (Specifically there was concern voiced by some public
health officials that the bat variant might behave 'differently' than those
variants already studied, ie.  that the ferrets might be capable of
transmitting the virus for a significant time before being diagnosable.)
 
Those studies paid off handsomly; the relatively small number of ferrets
killed in the study have been far more than offset by the number of ferrets
NOT killed from changes taking place across the country regarding kill and
test policies.
 
It would have been nice if the compendium could have been changed without
the research, but IMO,it was definately worthwhile in this case.
 
-Ilena Ayala
[Posted in FML issue 2392]