51�Թ�

Hurried back to the “hospital trailer,” the animal was sedated and vaccinated against sylvatic plague carried by their favorite prey, work done in partnership with World Wildlife Fund.

Editing the genome of black-footed ferrets so that they could resist sylvatic plague, for example, could be a game changer.

One threat is sylvatic plague, a deadly bacterial disease introduced from Asia.

A program led by the nonprofit Revive & Restore intends to engineer resistance to sylvatic plague into the genomes of endangered black-footed ferrets by adding genes that evolved in domestic ferrets.

If the virus established a sylvatic cycle among deer mice, a person might get infected simply by sweeping up the dust laced with mouse droppings in a garden shed.