In case anyone else became a little confused about the SARS posts yesterday, here is a brief summary as I now understand it. There have been two recent, yet very different, studies about SARS and animals. The most recent study was published in the journal Nature. Scientists infected domestic cats and domestic ferrets (yes, Mustela furo, our little guys) with SARS. This was done primarily to find good animal models for vaccine and antiviral drug research; before such research can proceed, it must first be proven that the animals used are indeed able to get the illness in question. I'm not entering a debate about the rightness or wrongness of this, just explaining what was done. In this study (the one in Nature), the investigators also placed healthy ferrets in with the infected ones to demonstrate that the ferrets could pass it on to each other. This part, about the ferrets transmitting SARS, is where there may be some question about what happened. The healthy ferrets did become ill and eventually die, but there was concern that perhaps the healthy ferrets physically had contact with the cultured virus from the experimentally-infected ferrets. A completely different study was published a few weeks ago in the journal Science. This one was about animals from live animal markets in southern China. This is the one where an infected chinese ferret badger (Melogale moschata, not our ferrets) was mentioned and then the media in some cases confused things by saying a ferret was involved. This study made no mention of domestic ferrets at all. Citations: Nature 425, 915 (30 October 2003). SARS virus infection of cats and ferrets. Martina, Haagmans, et al. Science 302, 276 (10 October 2003). Isolation and characterization of viruses related to the SARS coronavirus from animals in southern China. Guah, Zheng et al. -Pam S. [Posted in FML issue 4317]