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“We made a mistake. There is no legal authority to ask mink farmers outside the 7.8 kilometer zones to slaughter their minks,” Jensen told TV2 on Tuesday. He did not know when the announcement was made, but it did not change the fact that mink farming in Crown Denmark was risky. Breeders must continue to kill animals for public health reasons. Up to 17 million minks are involved.
When the measure was announced last Wednesday, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said that all minks in Denmark should be killed to ensure that a mutation of the coronavirus that has occurred in the mink is contained. A communication from the Ministry of Environment and Food also said: “Based on a new risk assessment carried out by the health authorities, the government has decided to euthanize all Danish mink populations.”
The fur farmers were offered a bonus if they slaughtered their animals within a few days. In a new letter from the food authority Födevarestyrelsen to Danish mink farmers, it was said on Tuesday that they regretted that an earlier letter on Friday did not indicate it was a “request” to kill healthy herds outside the 7.8-kilometer zones.
As TV2 reported, the law only covers infected mink farms and populations in a given area, they said 7.8 kilometers. The government now wants to create the legal basis for a fast track procedure to kill healthy minks.
Mink mutation “not necessarily worrisome”
About the north Denmark The coronavirus mutation found in mink is currently very little known in scientific circles. A mutation in the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself “is not necessarily worrisome,” Andreas Bergthaler of the Research Center for Molecular Medicine (CeMM) in Vienna said of the APA on Tuesday. It is still difficult to assess what the Danish authorities base their initiatives on.
“The measures that were taken there (killing the entire mink population in the country) are obviously radical. For the international community of researchers, it is not yet clear on what basis of decision this will happen,” said the scientist, who joined to the Austrian Academy of Sciences ÖAW), which belongs to CeMM, deals with the mutations of the new virus.
