More mink news. This is a good article to read whether you have been follwing this story or not. Here are the highlights.
mink on fur farms were catching COVID-19. And they seemed to be able to pass it back to people.
Hundreds of mink farms in Denmark and the Netherlands had COVID-19 cases, and two farms in Utah had
reported the first U.S. cases in mink.
To date, COVID-19 has been found on mink farms in a total of nine countries
One mink-associated variant bears the same mutation as the coronavirus variant now spreading rapidly in the United Kingdom; each time such changes happen, there is a risk the virus changes in a way that could make it more dangerous and prolong the pandemic.
As of December 3, a total of 644 people associated with mink farms had contracted COVID-19 since June, along with another 338 people who work in mink pelting,
mutations believed to have originated in mink had shown up about 300 times in people in Denmark.
In Europe, the already-shrinking mink industry is now quickly crumbling. Efforts to ban fur farming, often in response to campaigns led by animal rights activists, are now accelerating. The Netherlands announced it would end mink farming for good in 2021, three years earlier than planned. France announced it would ban farming mink by 2025. Poland, where
undercover footage from the country’s largest mink farm appeared to show animals cannibalizing each other, is expected to soon
follow suit. Ireland, which is home to only three mink farms, previously had voted down a bill to end mink farming, but has now decided to
cull its farmed mink population preemptively, likely ending the industry in the country.
if the coronavirus escapes into the wild mink population, COVID-19 could become an entrenched and uncontrolled animal disease, wreaking havoc on animal communities and probably also occasionally infecting people.
“On a ranch, you can quarantine them. When you have a wild population, that’s impossible; you can’t stop them all,”
The USDA
announced the first known case of a non-captive wild animal with the coronavirus. A wild mink, trapped just outside a mink farm in Utah where there was a COVID-19 outbreak, tested positive. The strain was “indistinguishable” from that of the farm outbreak. The spillover had happened.