From:
Mike Janke
Date: 2001-04-09 21:18:00 UTC
Subject: Re: gagging ferret, more info
Trust me on this one, ECE is highly contagious. I'm sure that once
Dr. Williams reappears, he will verify that statement. If you have
ferrets that have not had ECE, and one came down with it and is in
contact with the others, they would, without a shadow of a doubt,
come down with it also. How did the one contract it?
I'm curious how your vet verified that ECE was the cause of death?
While ECE can kill, it usually takes the already ill and those that
are not supported during the illness and does so within the first
month or so. This is generally not a disease that hangs on for a
year, and then causes death.
Unless a sample of tissue was sent to Dr. Williams directly, it
doesn't seem likely that many pathologists out there would be able to
positively identify ECE since it was only recently identified. I
could be wrong on that, but again, I'm hoping that Dr. Williams will
jump in here and give us his take on it.
Mike
--- In Ferret-Health-list@y..., "tansy" <Tansy@p...> wrote:
>
> > From: Mike Janke [mailto:mjanke@m...]
> > ECE is definitely highly contagious. A ferret that comes in
contact
> > with another ferret that is an active carrier will come down with
ECE
> > within 48-72 hours of that contact.
> >
> Last year I had a ferret die, and at necrospsy she was diagnosed
with ECE.
> She had been sick for over a year. Only ONE of my 20+ ferrets also
became
> ill, and he was undergoing chemo for lymphoma at time. I KNOW some
of the
> others have never had ECE since I bred them. The ferret who was
sick had
> been in my household for 3 years when she got sick. So how does
this rectify
> with the description of ECE being "extremely contagious"?