From Dr. Bruce Williams:

Dr. Matti Kuipel at the Purdue University College of Veterinary Medicine, has definitively identified a coronavirus as the cause of epizootic catarrhal enteritis in the ferret. Loops of gut from a number of cases of ECE submitted to the Purdue Diagnostic Lab stained positively for antibodies against a particular type of coronavirus. These results have been repeated at a separate Canadian laboratory.

Another collaborator, Dr. Melissa Kennedy of the University of Tennessee appears to have isolated a primer for a restricted portion of the coronavirus genome from this material.

I have sent material from the original work that I did with the virus in 1994 for confirmation. We have long suspected coronavirus as the cause of ECE - the viruses were seen in the work done at the AFIP in 1994, and sporadically since then.

Dr. Kuipel's persistent efforts to nail down the cause of the disease (which he appears to have done in elegant fashion) will "legitimize" the disease in the veterinary literature and hopefully will open the door for others to conduct additional research, isolate this agent, and produce rapid diagnostic tests and a vaccine. We are currently working on publishing the pathology data from the entire investigation, dating back to 1994.

Please realize that this announcement DOES NOT mean that a rapid diagnostic test has been developed (all tests were run on either surgical biopsies of the intestine or autopsy material), nor does it mean that a vaccine is available, nor are the researchers developing any of these products for the market. However this is a vital piece of the puzzle, and should go far in enticing the right parties to look at the potential for developing these type of products.