Pets can have a very hard time with salmonella, too. Healthy ferrets,
if their exposure is not large, usually can resist infection, but if
the exposure is too high or their health is compromised then they are
can get it.

Once they get it salmonella is very hard to treat in ferrets and can
be fatal. So, it is not among the worst food poisonings (such as shiga
toxin producing strains of E. coli) that ferrets can get, but it still
can be dangerous.

Cooking sufficiently does kill salmonella. Avoid cross contamination
from cutting surfaces, knives, platters, etc. with thorough cleaning of
anything that touched the raw, and wash your own hands well. Don't
forget that these things can get into sponges and towels, so...

<http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20100809/sc_livescience/drypetfoodlinkedtohumansalmonellaoutbreak>

79 people, about half children, with salmonella from dry pet food in
2006-2008

>The infections, half of which struck children, are the first known
>human salmonella cases linked to dry dog and cat food.
 ...
>Because pet food usually contains meat, and meat can carry salmonella,
>the investigators turned to the families' dog and cat foods for clues.
>They found a variety of brands, but lot numbers stamped on the bags
>traced the food back to a common manufacturing facility in
>Pennsylvania owned by Mars Petcare US, according to a CDC website
>about the outbreak.
>The investigators found salmonella contamination in the flavoring room
>of the manufacturing plant, where dry food was sprayed with flavor
>enhancers before being packaged. The company instituted a voluntary
>recall of more than 23,000 tons of pet food in 2007. When the outbreak
>continued in 2008, Mars Petcare US recalled all of its products and
>eventually shuttered its plant.

That explains how it happened since cooking enough kills salmonella.
The salmonella wound up put on in the flavor enhancer after the cooking
had already happened. The route had always been puzzling.

>Salmonella can jump from pet food to humans in several ways, said
>Barton Behravesh. Pets can shed salmonella in their feces for up to 12
>weeks after infection, even if the dogs themselves don't appear sick.
>Children might have also played with the pet food and then put their
>hands -- or the food itself -- in their mouths.
...
>One of the strongest predictors of illness turned out to be whether
>the family pet was fed in the kitchen or not. For children under age
>2, feeding a pet in the kitchen raised the risk of infection about
>fourfold

and in the latest Science News:
<http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/61930/title/Chicken_poses_significant_drug-resistant_Salmonella_threat>

>More than one-in-five retail samples of raw chicken cutlets collected
>in Pennsylvania hosted Salmonella, a new study found
 ...
>And where these bacteria were present, more than half were immune to
>the germicidal activity of at least one antibiotic. Nearly one-third
>were resistant to three or more drugs.
 ...
>The good news: The Pennsylvania stats are lower than the chicken
>contamination rates seen in earlier studies involving other,
>admittedly less virulent food poisoning agents, such as Enterococcus
>faecalis.
...
>They also point to the wisdom of cooks adopting the precautionary
>principle: assuming that all the chicken that enters their kitchens
>is bugged.
...
>Some of the meat had been laying open, on display, in the butcher's
>case; others had come prepackaged. Some had been labeled organic and
>a few carried designations that the meat came from animals raised
>without use of growth-promoting antibiotics.
>
>Regardless of how the animals had been reared or what kind of outlet
>had sold the meat, all sources of chicken were equally likely to be
>contaminated, the researchers report in the August Foodborne Pathogens
>and Disease.

The article goes on to explain how over use and careless use of
antibiotics in the chicken farms themselves are leading to many
antibiotic resistant strains of salmonella (and the same problem
exists in cattle farms and others for types of food poisonings
typically from those animals).

>In the new study, 43 percent of tainted chicken hosted
>Salmonellaimmune to ceftiofur, an antibiotic approved for use on
>chickens as young as one-day old. That incidence rate is particularly
>disturbing, M'ikanatha's group points out, because resistance to this
>drug "correlates with decreased susceptibility to other
>extended-spectrum cephalosporins [antibiotics], including ceftriaxone,
>a drug of choice for treatment of severe salmonellosis in humans,
>particularly in children where therapeutic options are limited."
>Between 1996 and 2006, CDC charted a 17-fold increase in resistance to
>these ESC antibiotics.

Now, there are probably some farms that get chicks from their own eggs
and then raise from those without using antibiotics, but those will be
smaller farms and rare. In the large farms, the typical farms, the
chickens are very crowded so protection from disease and parasites
means many meds, and the chicks are brought in from another type of
facility which does the egging, incubation, and hatching (and back when
I was young the pointier eggs were thought to more likely become males
and the rounder ones more likely to be become females so some division
of fates was done even that early but I don't know how that is done
these days) then the chicks are trucked to other farms which raise
them and sell them to the distributor once raised. Reducing uses of
antibiotics in chickens to reduce the food borne disease risk will mean
changing practices that have been used for at least 60 years as well as
some newer ones that are even worse than they were in the 1950s. (BTW,
being a chicken farmer is not an easy haul; besides loads of heavy
work there is an increased risk of COPD later in life, and back when
relatives had one during my childhood those of us girls who dusted
the chicks with DDT had an increased risk of developing uterine
malformations as we grew up.)

Sukie (not a vet)

Recommended ferret health links:
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/
http://ferrethealth.org/archive/
http://www.afip.org/ferrets/index.html
http://www.miamiferret.org/
http://www.ferrethealth.msu.edu/
http://www.ferretcongress.org/
http://www.trifl.org/index.shtml
http://homepage.mac.com/sukie/sukiesferretlinks.html
all ferret topics:
http://listserv.ferretmailinglist.org/archives/ferret-search.html
"All hail the procrastinators for they shall rule the world tomorrow."
(2010, Steve Crandall)

[Posted in FML 6786]