Well, it seems quite clear that Fez did NOT have ECE - after only 4 days of diarrhea, he is back to normal. In fact, as soon as we decided to start force-feeding, he turned around. As you may remember, he's been sick with one thing and then another for the past 2 months; every time he starts getting better, he comes down with something else. We suspected PBD, and had him on chloramphenicol. He improved, and so we agreed to take in two fosters from Obadiah to work with. But then he stopped eating and started losing weight again. Then, the middle of last week, he started getting diarrhea, and when we gave him some pepto he started immediately pawing at his mouth and vomiting (continuously for a good 20 minutes or so, and on and off through the night). We took him to the emergency vet, and then to our regular vet the next day, both of whom felt the sudden vomiting was likely to be an allergic reaction, although they weren't sure what to (Dr. Weiss, on the FML, made a similar comment, suggesting that he was overly sensitive at this point and reacted to the Pepto). I tried a little pepto a day or so later, and while he kept it down he immediately started pawing at his mouth again, so I have to assume the Pepto was the culprit for that (obviously, he won't be getting it again in the future...). The diarrhea continued, and we started force-feeding. After about a day of the feedings he stopped loathing them, then started lapping up some of the mix first, and then lapping a little more... and then when we woke up Sun. morning his food bowl (which hadn't been touched until then) was suddenly empty, and he woke up and started chowing down multiple times during the day. Also, his stools started to look pretty close to normal. He's been off the Kaopectate for 36 hours and still acting normally, so I think we're out of the woods. I still don't know the cause - my guess is that he caught some bug, probably something so minor that a healthy ferret wouldn't have gotten it at all. It couldn't have been ECE; besides the fact that not all the symptoms match, the reality is that if a ferret with as compromised an immune system as Fez has could kick ECE in only 4 days, it wouldn't be the devestating disease it really is... I think this also has one other implication. Rudy commented the other day that ferrets from Obadiah's, in specific, are carriers of ECE. But Fez has a pretty messed-up immune system to begin with, and he had every chance to catch it if this were the case - Dave and I spent a good hour or so at Obadiah's, cleaning litter pans, and didn't shower or change clothes before entering the ferret's room (pretty stupid in retrospect, but...). Furthermore, Fez has both interacted with, and shared a litter box with the two fosterees. If they (or the other ferrets at Obadiahs) were actively shedding the virus, its hard to imagine how both Fez (with his already-compromised system) and Shadow (who'll be 5 in December) could have escaped without catching it. (And since its been 10 days since we brought Butter and P.B. Floyd home, its certainly been long enough). This isn't to make light of what Fez did catch - but Fez has been down a lot longer with other sicknesses than he was with what he just had now. And I don't mean to say that ECE isn't a risk - its a risk at any place where large numbers of ferrets come and go. But singling out any particular shelter as a disease vector really needs to take into account all the ferrets who haven't become infected, not just a couple reports that a ferret has. -Rochelle [Posted in FML issue 1292]