The post in the FHL which asked about superbugs pretty much just asked if ferrets who live in very sterile situations wind up at risk due to having immune systems that naive. The person never suggested that the ferrets should be exposed to possible disease carriers. Nor did she slam any shelters or homes which use a different approach. BTW, she does strictly quarantine newly arrived ferrets, and she has visitors use a parvocide. Want to learn more about risk factors for emerging diseases? This is a good read: <http://www3.niaid.nih.gov/about/directors/pdf/EmergingInfectionsLancetID.pdf> If this is a new disease or a new mutant of ECE, then let's face facts, until it is carried to Europe it simply isn't there... That happens in reverse, too. The ECE mutant that looks like dry FIP in symptoms may have first appeared in Europe given some reports. It's not just there any longer, though. :-( Luckily that one is very rare disease in its current iteration. (Whew!) The new disease does not "melt insides". It causes acute, extreme diarrhea and resulting extreme dehydration. Luckily, it looks like Tamiflu might work for it. There are two other drugs in that same class of medications which prevent or reduce viral replication. I don't know if the others might also work. A later message from a friend of one individual with something that the treating vet thought looked similar but had a different cause has since written that the poultry involved was not raw but there is a chance that it was accidently undercooked. E. coli was suspected according to that FHL post. Now, if it was shiga toxin producing E. coli even cooking won't work. Yes, that kills the bacterium but it does not remove the toxin. If it was a non-shiga-toxin-producer then being under-cooked would make a difference. Right now it seems like emotions are running a bit high. This is a time of year when they often do, and worrying about a possible new illness is a stressful thing, so the effect is cumulative. Never-the-less, it is best to not assume the worst, including about what another person might mean. In hard times it simply pays to stick together. 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/fhc/ http://www.ferretcongress.org/ http://www.trifl.org/index.shtml http://homepage.mac.com/sukie/sukiesferretlinks.html [Posted in FML 6195]