Bird flu outbreak at Utah mink farm raises concerns over government response | Utah

AAn outbreak of avian flu at a Utah mink farm — and the response from its owner and regulators — has raised concerns among infectious disease experts about the Trump administration’s ability to handle such viruses.

While mink getting sick is unlikely to produce a “tidal wave of human infections,” the apparent lack of transparency from government officials about infections is very troubling, said Jennifer Nuzzo, professor of epidemiology and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University’s School of Public Health.

“No animal or human will be protected from the ravages of this virus by secrecy,” Nuzzo said in a telephone interview Saturday. “The risk is greater in people who are exposed to sick animals. If that’s not your case, I think you can take that off your list of concerns, (but) that doesn’t absolve the government of its responsibility to try to prevent a pandemic.”

For the past two months, an outbreak of bird flu has spread to a farm about an hour outside Salt Lake City that raises thousands of minks for their fur, ProPublica reported earlier this week.

A state veterinarian, Amanda Price, handled the response and tried to get help from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), but federal officials told her they did not regulate mink and had not approved a vaccine for the animal, according to ProPublica, which obtained messages through the state’s public records law.

The USDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Officials with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spoke with Utah Department of Health staff but did not communicate with Price, the outlet further reported.

In other countries where such outbreaks have occurred, the government has ordered farms to kill their mink. Vets told ProPublica that’s what Utah farm owners should have been doing by now.

This is not the first recent outbreak at a Utah fur farm. During the Covid-19 pandemic, nearly 10,000 Utah mink died from the coronavirus and quarantines were put in place at nine farms.

The virus was likely transmitted to animals from infected workers, according to a report published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Mink are highly susceptible to infection by several viruses that also infect humans, according to a report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

But Nuzzo said she has “not seen any signs that the virus is spreading.”

“The scenario that worries me is this: Workers who are exposed to these animals will get sick, and some of them might die, and that’s terrible because we could potentially prevent that by thinking about protecting agricultural workers with a vaccine, like other countries are using,” Nuzzo said.

The virus could infect humans and become a pandemic if it combined with a flu virus, “a concern that grows with the start of each human flu season, when there are more flu viruses circulating,” Nuzzo said.

“I can’t tell you what the chance is of that happening. It could be zero,” she added.

In Utah, a fur trade representative told Price that culling minks at C&T Fenn Farms would kill the business and the industry, ProPublica reported.

But Tom Peacock, avian flu researcher at the Pirbright Institute, told the news agency that in such situations depopulation – that is, culling of mink – usually happens quickly and the fact that it did not happen in this case is “very concerning”.

Authorities also reportedly failed to monitor farmworkers for symptoms, despite CDC guidelines. ProPublica found two people working at the farm, one of whom had red eyes. The federal health agency recommends testing for this symptom.

Price and the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Farm owner Chad Fenn told the news agency the worker had dust in his eyes and the state health department did not recommend testing.

The Guardian was unable to reach Fenn immediately.

Nuzzo worries about how, she said, during Donald Trump’s second term, the federal government appears to be monitoring farms less for such potential viruses than previous administrations.

Shortly after Trump took office, his administration fired federal employees who were responding to an outbreak of avian flu among dairy cows.

Nuzzo said federal officials used to regularly call disease experts like her to “keep us informed about what they were doing.” That doesn’t happen anymore, she said.

“I found them very helpful because it allowed us to push them and say, ‘Well, what about this?’ and challenge some ideas,” Nuzzo said. “A lot is lost when this doesn’t happen…It may mean things are happening that people don’t see or are unaware of. It may also be that actions don’t get the attention they deserve.”