Bird flu is raging on a mink farm. It could trigger a human pandemic, experts say, but authorities won’t act. —ProPublica

The strain of bird flu that has plagued U.S. barns over the past four years has killed two people infected by sick animals. But as far as we know, humans cannot spread it. The virus remained a true “bird” flu, designed to attach to avian cells and not invade human throats and noses, where coughs and sneezes reliably spit droplets.

But under the right conditions, that could change. A single mutation could allow avian flu to take hold in humans and trigger a pandemic that experts say could be deadlier than COVID-19.

For that to happen, this bird flu would likely need to find an intermediate host – an animal vulnerable to viruses that infect both birds and humans. These animals would be crowded together, with each infection increasing the chances that a new strain could arise through mutation. Then, for this strain to spread from one species to another, it would need to have access to humans and have time to spread among them without being detected.

This perfect petri dish exists now, according to a ProPublica investigation. For more than two months, an avian flu epidemic has raged uncontrollably on a Utah farm that raises thousands of minks for their fur. Mink has lungs and airways that, at the cellular level, are remarkably similar to those of humans; they caught and spread other flus and infected some humans with COVID-19.

Instead of trying to stop the outbreak and prevent it from spreading to humans, state and federal authorities have only tried to keep its existence quiet, our investigation shows. Inaction amounts to a cascade of missteps that flu experts call “irresponsible” and “confusing.” One called it “playing with fire.”

Utah agricultural officials learned in mid-August that mink were dying of bird flu at C&T Fenn Farms, about an hour’s drive south of Salt Lake City, according to communications released under the state’s public records law.

If poultry had been infected, the strategy would have been clear: The strain is so virulent that if a single chicken tests positive, the U.S. government requires farmers to kill the entire flock to protect other farms as well as public health. Poultry farmers are reimbursed for the loss.

But there are no federal rules on how to treat sick mink.

Utah’s response was state veterinarian Amanda Price, who requested help from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which takes the lead on avian flu outbreaks involving poultry and cows.

USDA officials said they do not regulate mink and do not have an approved vaccine to administer to them. And although officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spoke with Price’s Department of Health counterparts, less involved in the outbreak, they never spoke to him and she never contacted him.

The threat of spillover is far from the minds of Utah officials, records and interviews show. Instead, the interests of a company breeding animals to be skinned into luxury pelts for shipment overseas have come to the fore.

“It’s been devastating,” Price told ProPublica of the outbreak and its impact on the farm owner. “This is his life’s work that he sees being destroyed. I really hope you understand the humanity behind this situation.”

Flu experts have been unequivocal that the government should have ordered the farm to cull its minks, as other countries have done.

But Utah never seriously considered it. A fur trade representative warned Price that it would kill the business and ultimately the industry. Farms spend decades breeding mink to develop unique genetic lines.

“There just aren’t a lot of options other than to sit and wait and see what happens,” Price said, noting that USDA officials did not urge her to kill the mink or give her the impression that bird flu in mink was riskier than infections in other animals that caught it, such as ducks and cows.

Flu experts found this answer surprising.

“Every other country I know of has had H5N1 on fur farms, the depopulation happened pretty quickly,” said Tom Peacock, an avian flu researcher at the Pirbright Institute. “The fact that the first instinct wasn’t to just depopulate and figure things out later concerns me a lot.”

And all the while, officials failed to monitor mink farmers for symptoms, as CDC guidance calls for.

Their exposure is important: the mink sneezes. They escape. They attack. “The minks are fierce,” said a Spanish-speaking “minkero” who works on a nearby farm, showing the scars left on him by the solitary, aggressive creatures. “You’re scared because the damn thing bites and scratches you.”

Currently in Washington State, authorities are working to trace the contacts of a symptomatic person exposed to dairy cattle infected with avian influenza. The patient isolates himself at home. Utah public health officials were conducting similar proactive surveillance. But they stopped after complaints from their colleagues at the Agriculture Ministry that farmers were inconvenienced by the measure.

“By doing active surveillance, we were making sure that farms didn’t want to work with them,” said Pamela Gomez Pinedo, respiratory epidemiologist for the Utah Department of Health. As a result, public health workers had “a pretty difficult time” getting details from agriculture officials, she said.

Under a 2025 agreement, the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food agreed to share information about bird flu outbreaks on farms, provided health officials do nothing to track workers’ health.

“We will only conduct active surveillance if there is evidence of human-to-human transmission,” Pinedo said in emails with a CDC epidemiologist. As the outbreak stretched over a month, CDC officials expressed concerns, wondering how anyone would know if a worker had been infected if they weren’t tested.

Price said the state’s policy of not monitoring workers is intended to allow farmers to decide whether to contact the Department of Health, rather than “putting it on them.” “If we started seeing people actively dying because of this, that would obviously change how we respond to this,” she said.

A telltale sign of avian flu infection in humans is redness of the eyes. It is present in more than 90% of cases and is often the only symptom presented by a person.

Last Saturday, a ProPublica reporter tracked down two people who worked at the Utah mink farm. One of them had visibly red eyes.

The CDC explicitly recommends testing for the symptom.

After ProPublica contacted the farm, its owner, Chad Fenn, contacted the Utah County Health Department about the red eyes, which had disappeared by Monday, he told ProPublica. He said the worker had dust in his eyes; the ministry did not recommend the tests.

“They won’t do anything,” Fenn said. “They said they didn’t see there was a need.” He said the department recommends testing only if other symptoms, such as a cough or sore throat, develop.

Half a dozen flu experts had no shortage of adjectives to describe their disbelief at the government’s decisions not to cull minks or monitor and test workers.

“It’s amazing to me,” said Gail Hansen, a former veterinarian and Kansas state public health epidemiologist. “Utah doesn’t want to be the epicenter of the next human flu outbreak, right?

Most of the new viruses that have shaken humanity over the last century come from animals. The Ebola virus probably came from fruit bats; HIV, chimpanzees. The leading theory regarding COVID-19 is that it jumped from bats to humans via an intermediate mammalian host such as a raccoon dog. And all modern flu pandemics have been avian flu viruses that mutated to spread to humans.

ProPublica reported extensively on the fallout in a 2023 series called “Roots of an Epidemic.” To avoid even deadlier fallout, experts around the world are urging governments to take a “one health” approach to viral threats, treating dangers to animals as dangers to humans.

That’s not happening in Utah, experts said after reviewing ProPublica’s findings. Both the state and federal government are responsible.

“There is no leader of this ‘one health’ team to take charge,” said Erin Sorrell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “This will allow the virus to continue to circulate, potentially adapt and potentially spread to another host, whether avian, mammalian or human.”

This strain of bird flu, which began ravaging U.S. poultry farms in early 2022, has proven adept at spreading to other species. It took hold in cows in 2024 and has since spread to dairies.

Yet federal guidelines aimed at preventing spread on mink farms do not consider cows a threat. Farmers are…