Mink samples matched the strain circulating in dairy herds
A ProPublica investigation published Oct. 23, 2026, found that Utah agriculture officials learned in mid-August that mink were dying of bird flu at C&T Fenn Farms, about an hour’s drive south of Salt Lake City. The farm raises thousands of mink for fur, and owner Chad Fenn said the virus was still spreading, though at a slower pace. Instead of trying to stop the outbreak and prevent it from spilling into humans, state and federal officials have done little except try to keep its existence quiet, the investigation found. Flu experts called the failure to act a cascade of missteps that was “irresponsible” and “puzzling”; one called it “playing with fire.”
The H5N1 strain had killed two people who caught it from sick animals. As of the investigation, the report said no known human-to-human transmission had been identified; the virus remained adapted to avian cells rather than human throats and noses. Federal policy took a different approach when poultry tested positive: the strain is so virulent that if a single chicken tests positive, the U.S. government requires farmers to kill the whole flock, with farmers reimbursed for the loss. No federal rules prescribe how to handle sick mink.
State veterinarian Amanda Price led Utah’s response and sought help from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which takes the lead on bird flu outbreaks involving poultry and cows. USDA officials said they did not regulate mink and had no vaccine approved for them. CDC officials spoke with Price’s health-department counterparts, who were less involved with the outbreak, but never talked to her, and she never reached out, according to the investigation.
The threat of spillover has been far from the minds of Utah officials, records and interviews show. Instead, front and center have been the interests of a business raising animals to skin for luxury pelts to ship overseas, ProPublica reported.
“It has been devastating,” Price told ProPublica of the outbreak and its impact on the farm’s owner. “This is his life’s work that he’s seeing be destroyed. I really hope that you understand the humanity behind this situation.”
Flu experts were unequivocal that the government should have ordered the farm to cull its mink, as other countries have done. But Utah never seriously considered a cull, after a fur trade representative warned Price that doing so would kill the business and, ultimately, the industry. Farms spend decades breeding mink to develop unique genetic lineages.
Price said USDA officials did not urge her to kill the mink or make her feel like bird flu in mink was any riskier than infections in other animals that have caught it, like ducks and cows. “There’s just not a lot of options out there other than kind of sitting and waiting and seeing what happens,” she said.
Flu experts found that response surprising. “Every other country that I’m aware of that has had H5N1 in fur farms, depopulation has happened pretty quickly,” said Tom Peacock, an avian influenza researcher at the Pirbright Institute. “The fact that the first instinct wasn’t just to depopulate and figure stuff out later is very concerning to me.”
CDC guidance urged officials to monitor mink workers for symptoms, but Utah did not, records and interviews showed. Their exposure is significant, the investigation said: Mink sneeze, they escape and they attack. “The mink are fierce,” said a Spanish-speaking “minkero” who works on a nearby farm, showing the scars he got from the aggressive, solitary creatures. “You get scared because the fucking thing bites, and it claws at you.” Pamela Gomez Pinedo, a respiratory disease epidemiologist for Utah’s health department, said active monitoring was discouraging farms from working with public health personnel. As a result, public health workers had a “pretty difficult time” getting details from agriculture officials, she said. Under a 2025 agreement, the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food agreed to share farm-outbreak information with health officials on condition that health officials did not track workers’ health.
Pinedo said Utah would conduct active monitoring only if it found evidence of human-to-human transmission. As the outbreak continued, CDC officials asked how officials could identify an infected worker without testing. Price said the policy allowed farms to decide whether to contact the health department rather than “forcing it on them,” though she said seeing people actively dying from the virus would change how officials respond. Meanwhile, Washington state officials were tracing contacts of a symptomatic person exposed to infected dairy cattle, who was isolating at home.
Eye redness is present in more than 90% of human H5N1 cases and is often the only symptom, according to the investigation. A ProPublica reporter tracked down two people who worked at the Utah farm, one of whom had a visibly red eye. The CDC explicitly urges testing for the symptom. After the news organization contacted the farm, Fenn said he reported the symptom to the Utah County Health Department. Fenn said the worker had gotten dust in the eye and that it had cleared by Monday. “They’re not going to do anything,” Fenn said. “They said they don’t see that there’s a need.” He said the department recommended testing only if other symptoms, like a cough or sore throat, developed.
The virus at the farm came from the strain that has circulated in dairy herds. The strain began spreading through U.S. poultry farms in early 2022 and took hold in cows in 2024. Federal guidance for limiting spread to mink farms warns against wild birds and raw poultry but does not address feeding beef products to mink. Fenn said the animals routinely received raw livestock organs, including organs from cows.
Dairy cattle exposed to bird flu are not depopulated and can be slaughtered even though researchers have found the virus in tissue from sick cows. USDA officials have insisted that beef for human consumption is free of bird flu, partly because the virus concentrates in parts of the cow that people do not usually eat. Genomic data from Utah mink lungs and brains showed the animals carried the same strain found in dairy herds. Officials said they did not know whether contaminated beef had infected the mink.
Mink lungs and airways are similar to people’s at the cellular level, and the animals have caught and spread other flus and infected some humans with COVID-19, according to the investigation. Their airways also contain an abundance of the type of cell receptors common in human throats and noses that can serve as pathways for infection. In mink, the dairy strain of bird flu may have found a much better host for mutating into a human flu, because of that abundance of receptors. A 2024 study found that one mutation in the dairy strain could switch the virus from preferring bird-type receptors to human-type receptors, while studies in ferrets — a close relative of mink — found mutations that allowed the virus to attack human-type cell receptors.
Scientists told ProPublica it remained unclear how large an evolutionary leap would be needed for the virus to spread among humans, or whether mink would be the host allowing that leap. For that to happen, ProPublica reported, the bird flu would likely need an intermediate host — an animal vulnerable to viruses that infect both birds and humans. These animals would be crowded together, each infection raising the odds that a new strain could arise through mutation. For that strain to jump across species, it would have to have access to humans and time to spread among them undetected. Under the right conditions, experts said, a single mutation could give the virus a foothold in people and spark a pandemic potentially deadlier than COVID-19. Most of the new viruses that have shaken humanity in the past century have spilled over from animals, ProPublica noted: Ebolas likely came from fruit bats; HIV, from chimpanzees. The leading theory for COVID-19 is that it jumped from bats to humans via an intermediate host mammal such as a raccoon dog. And all the modern flu pandemics have been bird flu viruses that mutated to spread in humans.
“How this ultimately plays out really depends on what happens with the virus,” Meghan Davis, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, said. Davis said the lack of a robust response might have no dire consequences, but people could also be unlucky.
The outbreak also carried a reassortment risk, in which another influenza virus could infect the same cell as bird flu and exchange broad sections of genetic material. The Utah outbreak began when little seasonal flu was circulating, but September brought one of the earliest starts to flu season on record, compared with November, when the virus normally takes hold. “The most likely scenario for a pandemic is that we have a virus that reassorts with another virus,” Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health, said. “Obviously, having this circulate amid human flu season is not great.”
ProPublica reported extensively on spillover in a 2023 series called “Roots of an Outbreak.” To prevent more deadly spillovers, experts worldwide urge governments to take a “one health” approach to viral threats, treating dangers to animals as dangers to humans. That is not happening in Utah, experts said after reviewing ProPublica’s findings; both the state and federal government are to blame. “There’s no leader of this ‘one health’ team to take charge,” Erin Sorrell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said. Sorrell said the lack of leadership would allow the virus to keep circulating, adapting and potentially spilling into another host.
A half dozen flu experts had no shortage of adjectives to describe their disbelief at the government decisions not to cull the mink or monitor and test the workers. “It’s amazing to me,” said Gail Hansen, a former Kansas state public health veterinarian and epidemiologist. “Utah doesn’t want to be the epicenter of the next human flu outbreak, right?” Neil Vora, executive director for the Preventing Pandemics at the Source Coalition, called the Utah events a “clear warning sign” about the dangers posed by mink farms. “Fur farms are to produce pelts purely for luxury goods, to make fancy coats,” he said. “It’s absurd that we’re willing to gamble with the lives of millions of people just to keep an industry alive.”
Utah officials were more responsive during the 2020 COVID-19 outbreaks on mink farms, including C&T Fenn Farms. The state invited federal officials to Utah to research how the virus adapted and moved. Given mink’s reputation as escape artists, wildlife experts set up traps around infected farms, and the traps frequently caught mink carrying COVID-19 that had originated in the nearby barns. The virus infected both escaped mink and wild mink they had come in contact with, and mink and farmworkers were frequently tested. As other states and countries took the same measures, they identified humans infected by the mink with COVID-19 and, ultimately, human-to-human transmission. No comparable bird-flu measures are underway in Utah, and a USDA spokesperson said federal involvement in 2020 reflected the virus’s significant potential to move between humans and animals.
USDA scientists sequenced and published the first samples from the dead Utah mink. Experts and the CDC told ProPublica that those sequences showed no particularly concerning mutations. But in the past two months, experts said, the virus is sure to have continued mutating as it spread; it is only a question of whether those mutations could confer some advantage in infecting humans as well. “As long as it continues to go mink to mink, then it becomes more and more likely that it could jump to a human,” Hansen said.
Fenn said new samples had been taken two weeks earlier, while Price was still waiting for the results. John Korslund, a retired USDA official who helped coordinate the response to COVID-19 on mink farms several years prior, was one of several experts who said officials needed to look closely at newer genetic samples to see how the virus is evolving. “I really want to know what the virus has done, from when it started to today,” Korslund said. He asked whether accumulated mutations were making the virus more dangerous.
ProPublica began reporting the outbreak in late summer after a USDA dashboard showed that seven captive mink in Utah had tested positive. Neither the USDA nor Utah officials had announced the outbreak publicly and initially declined to discuss what was happening on the farm. Communications obtained under the state public-records law, first published by the Animal Welfare Institute and reported on by the Salt Lake Tribune, showed Utah officials took pains to protect the farm’s privacy amid the outbreak. The state did not declare an emergency because officials said doing so could alert animal rights groups.
Public health veterinarian Willy Lanier told colleagues to keep the outbreak under a “closer hold” than poultry and dairy outbreaks. A state health-department spokesperson said the confidentiality was consistent with state protocol and that local health officials had been informed. The Utah County Health Department spokesperson told ProPublica, “That would be news to me,” when contacted about a possible outbreak.
Price said she had not visited the farm and had relied on Google Maps and conversations with Fenn and the farm’s veterinarian. She said she had become confident the virus would remain on the property because the mink normally left only when slaughtered and skinned at year’s end and because she expected escaped animals to be recaptured. Short of a formal quarantine, she gave the farm a verbal hold barring the movement of mink, manure and carcasses off the property.
Price said Utah had not identified another case linked to the farm and considered the measures successful. Price’s assertion did not allay the concerns of experts that ProPublica spoke with. When poultry test positive for this strain of bird flu, all nearby farms are quarantined and tested for the virus. But the approach in Utah relies on farms reporting cases or the public calling in reports of dead birds in the area. “If you’re not looking for something, you won’t find it,” Sorrell said. She said Utah could not rule out additional cases without active surveillance.
Fenn said his conversations with state officials made him less worried about any kind of spread. When the outbreak started, Fenn said, he asked whether the bird flu could infect people. “Right off the bat, the state people we reported to, they said you don’t need to worry too much,” Fenn said. “My guys wear masks every day. They have glasses they can wear. Me? I don’t wear it at all. Never have, never will, because I’ve been doing it for 40 years.” Fenn said he thinks concerns about mink as a particularly risky bird flu host are trumped up by anti-fur activists, the same forces that he believed were behind the reactions in Spain and Finland, which depopulated mink farms hit with bird flu. “Europeans are a little scared of everything,” he said. “They’re going to do what they’re going to do, and here in the United States, we’re going to do what we’re going to do.” Price said she knew those countries had culled mink after infections with the same strain but did not investigate their reasons for doing so.
Fenn said he wanted to vaccinate the mink to prevent further deaths. Price asked the USDA about a vaccine previously used on endangered wild species but said the request produced no result. The USDA said its animal-health division had no species-specific regulatory authority or dedicated programs for vaccinating or depopulating mink or compensating farmers. A USDA spokesperson said Congress would have to fund a mink-depopulation program; the federal program for culling poultry has cost more than $1 billion since 2022.
The fur industry has struggled as American consumers increasingly reject fur. Domestic farms peaked about a decade ago and often sold pelts that ended up in China, while foreign farms have posed a growing competitive threat. While animal rights advocates have pushed for Congress to adopt legislation that would phase out the fur industry, buying out farmers over the course of a year to end the practice once and for all, winds in Congress are blowing the other direction: the Senate will soon weigh in on the latest Farm Bill, which seeks to expand market opportunities for mink farmers by undoing a prohibition in federal law on subsidizing the fur trade.
Fenn said the virus continued spreading on the Utah farm, although at a slower pace. Experts told ProPublica the outbreak still posed a risk. “I would want a full on hazmat suit if I were on that farm,” Peacock said. He said he would rather not be on the farm at all.
Doris Burke contributed research.