Recently, there were two interesting long articles in Science News which may interest a number of the people here. They are from a human perspective but the mechanisms involved are so general that if they wind up holding as being more than just hypotheses after further research is done then they would certainly have ferret implications. One article was within the last half year if memory serves and it was on the possibility that living day-to-day in an overly clean environment might actually prevent the immune system from doing the work it needs to do to stay healthy and thereby throw it for a loop, also that it might prevent some useful forms of diseases or parasites from setting up house in the body and thus make it more vulnerable for worse illnesses. One health difficulty thought to possibly be increased in occurrence (not in degree) by too clean a home is allergies, another is GI tract vulnerability (some diseases and parasites are thought to possibly either modify their local environment or so much stimulate the immune system to respond locally that worse things can't grow there -- hence a preliminary study (smaller than 50 participants -- obviously still hypothetical and which still could be nothing more than coincidence) which was a very successful trial in which safe parasitic worms markedly decreased some very severe intestinal woes. Also, being considered in relation to Helicobacter pylori (which sheep and humans have, with humans having in very high numbers but only a few percent ever have severe responses) -- it is being considered that the bacterium might help protect against more severe bacterial illnesses and protecting against cancers of the upper stomach and esophagus, although it is also considered to play a role in increasing cancers of the lower stomach and mucusa (trade off -- possibly with one type decreasing as the disease decreases but the other concurrently increasing after a 20 year lag for enough damage to occur). Whether these concepts will pan out and then could carry over to ferret's Helicobacter species I just don't know but these bacteria are in the same genus. The Helicobacter article is a separate one from the "too clean" article and is in the current Science News, volume 156 so you might want to go to that website to read it. Anyway, it might be food for thought, or raise an area of current new work which you might want to follow, or simply make you feel better if you don't always get to ferret laundry quite as fast as you need to not feel guilty. The guilty feeling might be inappropriate. I am SO snowed under with obligations right now. Forgive me for being brief. I do NOT have time to look up the other SN article, and I do NOT have time to copy or look up a blasted thing, etc. [Moderator's note: The Helicobacter article in volume 156 is at http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc99/10_9_99/bob1.htm BIG] [Posted in FML issue 2835]