What happened at the Utah farm
An outbreak of bird flu has been moving through a Utah farm that raises thousands of mink for fur, according to reporting by ProPublica earlier this week. The operation sits roughly an hour from Salt Lake City, and the infection has persisted for about two months.
The Guardian, summarizing that reporting, said the way the farm's owner and government agencies have handled the situation has alarmed infectious disease specialists. Several of them question whether the Trump administration can manage threats of this kind.
A state veterinarian told to look elsewhere
Amanda Price, a state veterinarian, led Utah's response and asked the US Department of Agriculture for assistance. ProPublica, which obtained messages through the state's public records law, reported that federal officials told her the agency does not regulate mink and has no vaccine cleared for use in them. The USDA did not immediately respond to the Guardian's request for comment.
ProPublica also reported that officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spoke with staff at the Utah health department but not with Price herself.
Elsewhere, governments facing similar outbreaks have ordered mink to be killed, according to the report. Veterinarians told ProPublica that is what the Utah owners should already have done. A fur industry representative, however, told Price that culling the animals at C&T Fenn Farms would destroy the business and the wider industry. Tom Peacock, an avian influenza researcher at the Pirbright Institute, told ProPublica that depopulation normally happens fast and that the delay here is “very concerning.”
Questions about the farm's workers
ProPublica reported that nobody tracked whether people employed at the farm were developing symptoms, even though CDC recommendations call for that kind of follow-up. The outlet identified two workers, one of whom had a red eye, a symptom for which the CDC encourages testing.
Owner Chad Fenn told ProPublica the irritation came from debris and that state health officials had not advised a test. The Guardian said it could not immediately reach Fenn. Price and the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food also did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
What experts say about the risk
Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiology professor who directs the pandemic center at Brown University's School of Public Health, said the sick mink are unlikely to cause a “tidal wave of human infections.” She said she does not “see any signals that the virus is spreading.” Even so, she called the apparent lack of openness from officials very troubling. “No animal or human will be protected from the toll of this virus through secrecy,” she said.
Nuzzo said people with no contact with sick animals can set the matter aside as a personal worry, but that does not relieve the government of its duty to head off a pandemic. Her main concern is for workers exposed to infected animals, some of whom might die in a way that vaccination, as used in other countries, could help prevent.
She also described a longer-term scenario in which the virus combines with a human influenza virus, a possibility she said becomes more worrying as flu season brings more viruses into circulation. Asked about the probability, she said, “I cannot tell you what the probability of that is. It could be zero.”
Background and federal oversight
Utah's fur industry has faced an outbreak before. During the Covid-19 pandemic, nearly 10,000 mink in the state died of the coronavirus, and quarantines were placed on nine farms. A report in Emerging Infectious Diseases said the animals were probably infected by sick workers. Research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that mink are highly susceptible to several viruses that also infect people.
Nuzzo said federal monitoring of farms for such viruses seems lighter in President Donald Trump's second term than under earlier administrations. She noted that soon after he took office, his administration dismissed federal employees who were responding to a bird flu outbreak among dairy cows. She said officials once held regular calls with outside disease experts, which allowed those experts to press them on their thinking, and that this no longer happens. In her view, much is lost without that exchange, and some actions may go unseen or unexamined.
