FYI all: My wife being an RN, she tends to read those medical thrillers (fiction and NON!) and recently opened up a new one titled "FLU...The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It", by Gina Kolata, a science reporter for the NY Times. It is out in softcover by Touchstone Books published by Simon and Schuster, NY. ISBN is 0-7432-0398-4. The book is fascinating and a good read, but...the author goes out of her way to make some rather unkind comments about our fuzzy friends, many of whom gave their lives to the ground breaking flu research in the early 1900's, after the infamous 1918 flu klled an estimated 40 MILLION people almost "overnight". For instance on pages 73, she states that "Ferrets are small and sometimes VICIOUS MAMMALS (my caps...P), relatives of weasels, and not the usual laboratory animal..." and then goes on to elaborate on their use for flu research. In 1933, one of the researchers, Wilson Smith, actually contracted the flu from a ferret that sneezed in his face, and that strain of flu (WS...named for Dr. Smith) still exists to this day! The story develops further, when the researchers found out that ferrets developed active flu from swine flu filtrate when innoculated by dripping it into their noses. Grisly business here but the author, on page 76, goes on to say that the experiments were not easy to do. "The SNARLY ((my caps..P) animals with SHARP (again, my caps..P) teeth did not want to sit still while Shope dripped flu-containing liquid into their noses" But it gets a bit better later on in the book, and don't get me wrong this is a GOOD book about disease...but about the ferret??? On page 286 she goes on with "Stuart-Harris was the one who had had to check the ferrets each day after the British team discovered those FIERCE RODENTS (my caps here, P) were almost uniquely susceptible to human influenza viruses..." OK, I draw the line there folks! I suppose that the authors research team were not communicating clearly, when passing along info to the writer, and the oversight made it into print...but the point here is that this is just another swipe to the face of what we know to be a wonderful, loving companion animal. Maybe Mayor Guliani read this book before issuing his ban on domestic ferrets in NYC? Ya gotta wonder! Anyway, hug a fuzzy and don't sneeze in their face if youre sick! putorius [Posted in FML issue 3332]