COVID and Animals - 2. Minks.

Author.

 Hayk S. Arakelyan. Full Professor in Medicine,

Doctor of Medical Sciences, Ph.D , Grand Ph.D .

Senior Expert of Interactive Clinical Pharmacology , Drug Safety,

Treatment Tactics, General Medicine and Clinical Research.

President of Rare and Incurable Diseases Association.

Yerevan-Armenia, Tokyo-Japan.

Continued of COVID  and Animals  -1. Bats.

“No matter how successful we are in fighting the threat of

 covid-19 at home, we will not end the suffering and fear

created by the virus unless we also combat it around the

 world. “

“Abigail Spanberger”

Introduction.

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus.Most people infected with the COVID-19 virus will experience mild to moderate respiratory illness and recover without requiring special treatment. Older people, and those with underlying medical problems like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease, and cancer are more likely to develop serious illness.The best way to prevent and slow down transmission is to be well informed about the COVID-19 virus, the disease it causes and how it spreads. It's hard to be definitive and rule anything out.” Farmers in Finland will start vaccinating the country's entire population of mink against the coronavirus.Local authorities in the country have given permission for an experimental vaccine to be used, the Finnish Food Authority announced.

COVID  and Animals  - 2. Minks.

In the United States, the first farmed mink with the coronavirus were identified in Utah in August 2020, and outbreaks have since occurred at 16 mink farms, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. Breeding mink for their pelts is widespread in northern Europe, North America, Russia, and China, often on farms with thousands of the animals kept in adjoining wire cages. In such close quarters, pathogens can easily pass from mink to worker, or vice versa, as they inhale infectious droplets or touch contaminated surfaces.

Indeed, since the spring of 2020, the coronavirus has hopscotched across more than 400 farms in Europe, emerging most recently, this month, in Poland, a leading producer. Before that, it was detected in North America, in Canada, in December. Around that time, the Netherlands, another major mink breeder, finished killing its several million animals to prevent further outbreaks and moved up its timeline for shutting down the industry from 2024 to 2021. And late last year, authorities in Denmark ordered all farmed mink to be killed after a mink-related virus variant was detected in people. Denmark and Sweden canceled their 2021 breeding seasons. In the United States, the first farmed mink with the coronavirus were identified in Utah in August 2020, and outbreaks have since occurred at 16 mink farms, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. The International Fur Federation’s Mike Brown says more than 12,000 of the country’s roughly three million farmed mink had died from COVID-19 before the annual slaughter for their pelts, in December.

half a year after the first American outbreak, whether mink have spread the disease to people in the U.S., as was confirmed in the Netherlands and Denmark.

The USDA hasn’t recommended culling mink but has issued guidelines calling for infected farms to be quarantined, for workers to wear protective face masks, and to stay home if sick with COVID-19. Yet ultimately in the U.S., it’s left to state governments to lead the response to outbreaks on mink farms. Allowing breeding to begin in the U.S. this year would be “shockingly reckless,” said the nonprofit Utah Animal Rights Coalition in recent letters to the CDC and USDA. “Swift action is necessary to effectively combat the COVID-19 pandemic, prevent the loss of human life, and the spread of the disease to wild animal populations,” they wrote, calling for a halt to mink production.

U.S. mink mysteries

Coronavirus infections in mink haven’t been restricted to farms. Last autumn, investigators in Utah found an infected wild mink in the “immediate vicinity” of a farm harboring the disease. The news, which wasn’t made public by the USDA until mid-December, has compounded fears of mink sickening both humans and wild animals. Also in December, biologists sampling wild animals around infected farms in Oregon found two mink believed to have escaped from a nearby farm that were carrying the virus.

In Utah, where 12 of the 16 mink farm outbreaks have occurred, dogs and feral cats have also tested positive on the farms, raising questions about how that wild mink may have contracted the virus. Utah state veterinarian Dean Taylor says one possibility is that a feral cat was the source. Another is that the mink caught it from another wild mink, which would suggest that the virus is already more widespread than scientists realize. Or perhaps the mink found its way into the mink barn on the farm, got infected there, and went back out.

In the wild, mink are solitary animals, which reduces the likelihood of disease spread among wild mink, according to Hammer. But whether the coronavirus passes from mink to other wildlife species “also depends on how mink populations interact with others,” says Lane Warmbrod, a senior analyst at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “I can say it is entirely plausible that a virus jumps between two mammalian species, as we've already seen it do from humans to mink and back.”

So far, none of the small sampling of wild animals trapped and tested around mink farms in the U.S. (and Europe), beyond the wild mink, have been found with coronavirus.

But on farms in the U.S., public health and wildlife protection advocates say, there’s a worrying lack of transparency about coronavirus outbreaks. The Utah Animal Rights Coalition has urged the Biden administration to take a more proactive role in tracking outbreaks, assessing the risks from them, with steps including rapid genome sequencing of the virus on the farms, and publicizing findings.

Genome sequencing of the coronavirus in mink and humans, the technique used in the Netherlands and Denmark to rapidly help confirm whether the virus jumped between species is still ongoing in the U.S., according to the CDC. In the Netherlands, such work was conducted within weeks of its first outbreak. The CDC has declined multiple requests for interviews about the slow progress.

Warmbrod says many health departments lack the expertise and tools to do genomic analysis and must outsource the work to academic and national laboratories, which can cause delays.

The CDC told National Geographic in a statement that it’s working with the USDA to sequence samples from people and animals on mink farms and the surrounding areas to understand transmission pathways better and identify genetic variants of the virus. Such work takes time, the CDC says, but “currently, there is no evidence of mink-to-human spread in the United States.”

Ahead of the breeding season, Wisconsin is now administering coronavirus vaccines to mink farm workers, ranking them as essential workers with higher risk and priority than many other occupations, such as teachers.

If you have any questions concerning “ COVID  and Animals  - 2. Minks”, interactive clinical pharmacology , or any other questions, please inform me . 

      Prof. Hayk S. Arakelyan

To Be Continue…