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Five animals on two farms tested positive, many others are believed to be affected.
By Azi Paybarah
Mink on two Utah farms has the first in the United States to test positive for coronavirus, federal officials announced Monday.
Five farm animals have tested positive for the virus, but many more are believed to be inflamed due to a recent accumulation of mink deaths on farms, said Bradie Jill Jones, spokesman for The Utah Department of Health and Agriculture. or 3 mink die a day on a farm, he says.
“Producers need to worry earlier in the past week when those mortality rates soared,” Jones said. The owners of the two farms, which the government refused to identify, contacted a veterinarian who alerted agricultural officials.
Mink samples were analyzed at the Utah Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory and the Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory in Washington, he said. These effects were later demonstrated through tests conducted at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Veterinary Services Laboratories.
Several staff members from any of the farms also tested positive for coronavirus, Jones said, but the branch has not made a decision about whether those infections are related to the farm. There is no evidence that animals play a vital role in the spread of the virus to humans, according to the federal Department of Agriculture.
Jones said the farms will “compost” with the mink assigned to “so that these animals do not leave the farms where these infections have occurred.”
Of the 2.7 million mink skins produced in the United States last year, more than a million came here from Utah, according to federal data. The only state that produces more Wisconsin, which produced just over a million mink skins.
“Mink was known to be susceptible” to the virus after an outbreak on several farms in the Netherlands, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Monday in a pronounced infection in Utah. In June, thousands of mink were shot in Spain and the Netherlands on suspicion of transmitting the disease to people.
Michael Whelan, executive director of the industry organization representing mink manufacturers in the United States, said he was not involved in a similar and widespread mink epidemic in the United States. “Our mink farms are spread across a much larger domain than in Europe,” he said in an interview. In the Netherlands, affected mink farms have been grouped together in combination in spaces with higher degrees of inflamed humans, he said.
“We don’t expect an epidemic like the one that’s happening in Europe,” he said. “The mink industry has taken biosecurity very seriously for many years.”
Kitty Bloch, executive director and president of the American Animal Protective Society, said the Utah epidemic is “a big problem.”
“If you want to deal with the next pandemic, you want to take a look at our animal dating,” he said. “The physical form and situations in which we put these animals have an effect on our physical form. We can’t separate them.”
In April, several tigers and lions at a New York zoo tested for the virus.
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