The influenza shots are dead virus and not contagious but the nasal immunization is mildly contagious short term according to the CDC site so use lots of hand washing, etc. with that one. See the site for more info and to see if this applies to this year's vaccines. Please, be aware, though, that there is a shortage of influenza shots this year and as a result there is a serious request from the CDC that ONLY those who truly need it badly get it. This includes: those with a serious chronic health problem (asthma, malignancy, etc.), those older than 65, and so on... See: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/ and http://www.cdc.gov/flu/protect/whoshouldget.htm It IS possible to have influenza and not pass it along. These days I am among those who need the vaccine for health reasons; Steve is not. We've had influenza in the household many years and only ONCE have we had a ferret catch it. The most important thing is loads of thorough hand washing, followed by using a face mask around the ferrets when sick or feeling a bit just case illness might break in the next few days. The influenza variety they get is Influenza A. ---- Looking at multiple articles on MEN it appears that some variants can act as suppressors and some as pre-disposers. Look at the last sentence below. Is it possible that in selecting for neural crest related genetic markings and thereby vastly increasing their representation in the population that perhaps at the same time as possibly increasing the percentage of alleles like the KIT oncogene that the percentage of MEN also increased? I really AM asking, because if the genetic shift toward more ferrets with neural crest related markings has two ways it might increase malignancies those in countries where breeders and buyers have NOT yet made this mistake can be warned. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi? cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11050843&dopt=Abstract >Multiple endocrine neoplasias (MEN) are syndromes inherited as >autosomal dominant. The application of the techniques of molecular >biology has made possible the identification of the genes causing MEN >1 and 2. The gene responsible for MEN 1 belongs to the family of >tumor suppressor genes and encodes for a protein named MENIN whose >function remains to be elucidated. The identification of mutant MEN 1 >gene carriers who are at risk of developing this syndrome requires >frequent biochemical screening for the development of endocrine >tumors. MEN 2 is a consequence of mutations in the Ret proto-oncogene >(c-Ret). This gene encodes for a tyrosine kinase receptor thought to >play a role in the development of neural crest-derived tissue. Wow! Try searching under Multiple Endocrine Neoplasia + neural crest in a search engine like Google. There is enough to keep a person busy for ages! I hope that this can be studied properly in veterinary genetics research to see what is going on with ferrets! Let's face it, before all those fancies we just didn't see these things so often and certainly not so early. I remember form internet reports that the start of the rate increase and the appearance of more cases in young ferrets happened in two discrete clumps several years apart, and we were NOT the only ones to notice that by a long shot. There also are multiple people who suspect that we are dealing at least in part with multiple genetic whammies, and degree of expression in disease might be dependent on how many are inherited in combination or which variants are inherited. Remember that there can be multiple routes for getting certain markings but that when you mess with something as basic as the neural crest (which is a set of early fetal cells that develop into multiple later tissue types) you mess with a lot more than just markings. If you mess with the cardiac neural crest (which is bit earlier before the neural crest and cardiac neural crest tissues separate) you can mess up even more. Breeding for appearance that is NOT like the original appearances seen for centuries is not something which should be done without first reading extensively about medical disorders which are related to genetics -- something which pretty well no one breeding for appearance has done. Those people should know a lot more than I do before they start rather than following when folks like me find info. Marked heads beyond the original masks, and/or spots/splotches that are not cleanly margined complete and bilateral mitts and bibs without spotting say, "Get me check ups more often because I may be more vulnerable to malignancies, and be extra careful to follow a lot of the preventative measures at home and in care." The "production" of such fancies with non-standard head markings and non-standard splotches/spots -- which happened first for a long while with one of the large farms (not with the largest at first) and with a number of private breeders, and then began being done by many is driven by buying demand. Fancy markings should not be among the high criteria when buying a ferret; many of those markings should actually make you wary and set you to requesting more standard markings. As long as demand exists there won't be real tackling of this prevalence in the population. Sadly, money must trump health with a number of breeders of all sizes given the vast increase in the fur markings associated with neural crest related medical disorders -- which sadly might have two (or more?) routes (KIT, MEN) for increasing malignancy and neoplasia rates. [Posted in FML issue 4659]