Bird flu outbreak at Utah mink farm sparks concerns about government response

An outbreak of bird flu at a mink farm in Utah – and the response from its owner and regulators – have sparked concerns from infectious disease experts about the Trump administration’s ability to manage such viruses.

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

“No animal or human will be protected from the toll of this virus through secrecy,” Nuzzo said in a phone interview on Saturday. “The risk is greatest among people who have exposure to sick animals. If that is not you, I think you can take this off your worry list, [but] it does not abdicate the government of its responsibility to try to prevent a pandemic.”

For two months, an outbreak of bird flu has spread at a farm about an hour from Salt Lake City that raises thousands of mink for their fur, ProPublica reported earlier this week.

A state veterinarian, Amanda Price, handled the response and tried to get help from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), but the federal officials told her that they didn’t regulate mink or have a vaccine approved 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.

Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials spoke with Utah health department 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. Veterinarians told ProPublica that is what the Utah farm owners should already have done.

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

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

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

But Nuzzo said she didn’t “see any signals that the virus is spreading”.

“The scenario I’m worried about is this one: workers who are exposed to these animals will get sick, and some of them might die, and that is awful because we potentially could prevent that through thinking about protecting farm workers with a vaccine, like other countries are using,” Nuzzo said.

The virus could infect humans and become a pandemic if it were to combine with an influenza virus, “a worry that grows with the onset of each human flu season when there are more influenza viruses in circulation”, Nuzzo said.

“I cannot tell you what the probability of that is. It could be zero,” she added.

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

But Tom Peacock, an avian influenza researcher at the Pirbright Institute, told the news organization that in such situations, depopulation – ie, culling the mink – typically happens quickly and the fact that it didn’t in this case is “very concerning”.

Officials reportedly also did not monitor the farm workers for symptoms, despite CDC guidance to do so. ProPublica found two people who worked at the farm, one of whom had a red eye. The federal health agency urges testing for that symptom.

Price and the Utah department of agriculture and food did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The farm owner, Chad Fenn, told the news organization that the worker had dust in his eye and that the state health department did not recommend testing.

The Guardian could not immediately reach Fenn.

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

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

Nuzzo said federal officials used to hold regular calls with disease experts such as her to “keep us informed about what they were doing”. That no longer happens, she said.

“I found them quite useful because it allowed us to push them and say, ‘Well, what about this?’, and to interrogate some of the ideas,” Nuzzo said. “A lot is lost when that doesn’t happen … It might mean that things are going on that people don’t see or know about. It might also be that actions don’t get the scrutiny they deserve.”