Resend since this appears to have been lost in the ether. Even a copy I sent myself to make sure messages were transiting properly was lost during that temporary problem. Anyway, this IS ferret related but has to give some non-ferret info, too, to get the points across. I will copy myself to see if this mail works. Just to be clear: Ferrets do NOT get the coronavirus MERS-CoV which is Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, and is from a specific type of coronavirus. MERS-CoV has been found in humans and camels, with its greatest rate in the subSaharan portion of Africa where the numbers of camels are higher, the strains and rates of MERS-CoV are higher in camel populations, and health care far worse so infection could be missed more easily. Outside the Middle East an infection has been spotted in bats which may be the precursor infection that mutated first into a form camels could get (now over decades several related strains) and a later mutation made human hosts possible. Indications are that MERS in camels first entered the Middle East in camels imported for slaughter. (There was also one report of finding the coronavirus in a goat kidney but nothing further on that regard so perhaps they first used just a general coronavirus test and instead spotted a coronavirus of goats, a problem similar to the one casual transmission report that happened with ferrets years ago in a SARS study. I don't know.) MERS is NOT at all the same infection as MRSA which is Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Ferrets can be infected in a laboratory setting with a DIFFERENT zoonotic coronavirus that humans get, SARS. That coronavirus is also found in multiple members of Carnivora in the wild, and has been caught in home settings by some dogs and by a number of cats. Early in the studies of SARS one study reported casual ferret to ferret transmission of SARS in a lab setting but that looks to be a situation in which the researchers used a general coronavirus test and the ferrets actually had ECE. Several early SARS researchers did not realize how many different types of coronaviruses spread around in mammals there are, nor that most of those types are very species-specific. > > ECE is the common ferret type of coronavirus. There is also a mutant of ECE which presents like cat dry FIP does, but genetically is NOT FIP, but instead genetic studies indicate that it is an ECE MUTANT which acts like FIP so is sometimes referred to as FIP-like. You can read about them in > http://www.ferrethealth.msu.edu There is currently work elsewhere which is funded by an absolutely wonderful list member to try to create a coronavirus vaccine for the ferret coronaviruses. Dr. Bob Wagner is working on that. Also, there is work ongoing elsewhere to find out how to treat coronaviruses. This began because of SARS and MERS-CoV but the aims have included finding ways of eventually treating coronaviruses in general, so perhaps may help with ferret coronaviruses at some point, too. Currently, the only approach to coronaviruses is to treat symptoms to minimize damage. The system version on ferret corona virus is rare. The older and more common ferret coronavirus, ECE, the enteric strain colloquially known as the Greenies and similar terms, is wide-spread, may be the root cause of some cases of IBD due to the profuse damage it can cause in the small intestine, and the damage caused may be a trigger for some later GI malignancies. Young ferrets with it can be asymptomatic. Anyone who has been in the ferret community long enough will recall when ECE first began being widely reported, the high death toll it took before vets figured out better how to manage it, and that it first spread through ferret shows. Doctor Bruce Williams, then at the now defunct but highly respected Armed Forces Institute of Pathology which went away due to severe damage from funding removal for Walter Reed during the Bush administration, was the researcher who first identified the responsible organism. Remember that discovery took not only very specialized equipment but also a willingness to think way outside the box from what was known at that time. Even today coronaviruses are understudied, which is why we lack treatments. Imagine how it was then, to think of a coronavirus and to recognize it as the causative organism decades ago. That finding was confirmed at Michigan State University. Dr. Matti Kiupel, of MSU, who also created the Ferret Health Advancement Group there (which can always use donors, PLEASE) is one of the most primary researchers who has been involved in gaining added information on ferret coronaviruses. Some researchers into MERS CoV have been using information from how ECE behaves in ferrets like routes of transmission (and, yes, MERS CoV did show up in camel fecal swabs), silent hosts, and viral shedding for as long as eight months after symptoms stop to give them directions for investigation. The last two aspects have not yet had completed studies. Knowing so much about a different coronavirus (ECE) in a different species (ferrets) may help solve some human health mysteries with MERS-CoV and with SARS. This is similar to when the discovery of the bacterial cause of ulcers in ferrets, Helicobacter mustelae, in work done at MIT Comparative Med, led to the discovery of a different ulcer causing genus Helicobacter species, pylori, in humans. [Posted in FML 8160]