Mink at two farms in Utah are the first words in the United States to test positive for the coronavirus, Monday announced state and federal officials.
Five farm animals test positive for the virus, but it is believed that many more are infected due to a recent increase in the number of mink deaths on the farm, Bradie Jill Jones, a spokeswoman for the Utah Department of Health and Agriculture, said. Typically, two or three mink die each day on a farm, she said.
“Producers began to worry early last week when that death toll skyrocketed,” Ms Jones said. The owners of the two farms, who officials refused to identify, contacted a veteran who warned officials of agriculture.
Samples of the mink were tested at the Utah Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory and the Washington Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory, officials said. Later, those results were confirmed by tests performed at the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Veterinary Services.
Several workers at the two farms have also tested positive for the coronavirus, Ms. Jones said, but the department has not determined if those infections are linked to the farm. There is no evidence that animals play a major role in spreading the virus to humans, according to the federal Department of Agriculture.
Ms. Jones said the farms “will compost” from the affected mink on site “so that these animals do not leave the farms where these infections have broken out.”
Of the 2.7 million mink fur produced last year in the United States, more than half a million came from Utah, according to federal data. The only state that produced more was Wisconsin, which produced a little over a million mink fur.
“Mink were known to be susceptible” to the virus following an outbreak in several farms in the Netherlands, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said in a statement on Monday announcing the infections in Utah. In June, Thousands of minks were slaughtered in Spain and the Netherlands on suspicion of transmitting the disease to humans.
Michael Whelan, executive director of the trade organization representing mink producers in the United States, said he was not worried about a similar widespread outbreak among mink in the United States. “Our mink farms are spread over a much larger area than in Europe,” he said in an interview. In the Netherlands, the affected mink farmers were clustered together and in areas with high rates of infected people, he said.
“We do not expect an outbreak like the things that are happening in Europe,” he said. “The mink industry has taken biosecurity very seriously for many years.”
Kitty Bloch, chief officer and president of the Humane Society of the United States, said the outbreak in Utah “was a big deal.”
“If you want to tackle the next pandemic, you have to look at our relationship with animals,” she said. “The health and the conditions in which we put these animals affect our health. We can not separate them. ”
In April, several tigers and lions at a zoo in New York tested positive for the virus.
