How mink, like humans, were slammed by the coronavirus

Denmark’s mink industry is gone, a victim of the coronavirus. The nation killed all its 17 million mink because of fears of a mutation in the virus that had spread from mink to people.

Separately, in Utah, farmed mink infected with the virus seem to have passed it on somehow to at least one wild mink, raising concern about whether the virus will find a home in wild animals. And around the world, farmed mink continue to fall victim to the coronavirus.

The United States, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Canada, Greece and Lithuania have all reported mink infections to the World Organisation for Animal Health.

Not only are mink the only nonhuman animal known to become severely ill and die from the virus, they are the only animal known to have caught the virus from humans and then passed it back. What terrified Danish officials was that the virus that jumped back to people carried mutations that seemed as if they might affect how well vaccines work, although that worry has faded.

Even if the mutations that have emerged so far don’t pose a danger to humans, it is clear that the virus rampages through mink farms once infection begin and continues to mutate in new ways. Some mutations that have evolved in humans have already made the virus more easily transmitted. From a public health point of view, there is no upside to offering the virus a second species in which it can evolve.

The Netherlands, which was already planning to ban mink farming for animal welfare, reasons, moved up the ban to next year from 2024 and has culled all its mink. The disease is such a threat to the industry that researchers are working on a vaccine for mink. And scientists who track viral infections in animals are concerned.

For Denmark, the mink story appears to be over. The country of about 6 million people produced 15 million to 17 million skins a year for the fur industry. But mink farming is banned for 2021, and a fallow year will mean that workers and infrastructure will disappear.

“It is highly, highly unlikely that they’ll be able to restart farming” in the future, said Mark Oaten, the head of the International Fur Federation. A minister resigned because the government had apparently overstepped its authority in ordering the culling of all mink, farmers are still negotiating for compensation and the nation’s prime minister wept at the plight of the farmers.

Now, the Danish government faces another spectacle as it plans to exhume mink carcasses that were improperly buried and in some cases began to rise from the ground, swollen with the gases of decomposition.

It has the feeling of a dark dystopian comedy, and the oddest thing of all may be that the mink themselves did not have much of a future anyway. Most, except for breeding stock, are killed every year.

Apart from lost business and jobs, threats to the fur industry might seem to many people to be the least of the worries posed by the pandemic. But the Danish mink nightmare is a reminder of the central role animals play in human pandemics. The virus seems to have come from bats, passing through some other animal on the way, and could easily enough pass from us to another kind of wild animal, establishing what epidemiologists call a reservoir, a permanent lake of disease waiting for us to fall in or sip from.