Nuzzo says federal monitoring of farms for viruses appears reduced

Disease experts no longer receive regular calls from officials

Nuzzo said she worried that, during Donald Trump’s second term, the federal government appeared to be doing less monitoring of farms for potential viruses than previous administrations. Separately, The Guardian reported that shortly after Trump took office, his administration fired federal employees who were responding to a bird flu outbreak among dairy cows.

She said federal officials used to hold regular calls with disease experts such as her to “keep us informed about what they were doing.” Those calls no longer happen, she said.

The federal-monitoring and expert-consultation assessments arose in reporting about an outbreak that had spread for two months at a farm about an hour from Salt Lake City. The farm raises thousands of mink for their fur. State veterinarian Amanda Price handled the response and tried to get help from the US Department of Agriculture, but USDA officials told her the agency did not regulate mink or have a vaccine approved for the animal, according to ProPublica, which obtained messages through Utah’s public-records law.

Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials spoke with Utah health department staff but did not communicate with Price, ProPublica reported. The USDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiology professor and director of the pandemic center at Brown University School of Public Health, said the apparent lack of transparency from government officials about the infections was very troubling. She said the mink becoming sick was unlikely to produce a “tidal wave of human infections” and that she did not “see any signals that the virus is spreading.”

“No animal or human will be protected from the toll of this virus through secrecy,” Nuzzo said in a phone interview on Saturday. She said the risk was greatest among people who had exposure to sick animals. “If that is not you, I think you can take this off your worry list,” she said, adding that this did not abdicate the government of its responsibility to try to prevent a pandemic.

Nuzzo described the scenario that worried her: workers exposed to the animals could become sick, and some of them might die. She said that harm could potentially be prevented by protecting farm workers with a vaccine, like other countries were using.

She said the virus could infect humans and become a pandemic if it combined with an influenza virus, a worry that grows with the onset of each human flu season when more influenza viruses circulate. “I cannot tell you what the probability of that is. It could be zero,” she said.

In other countries where such outbreaks occurred, governments ordered farms to kill their mink, and veterinarians told ProPublica that Utah farm owners should already have done the same. At C&T Fenn Farms, a fur trade representative told Price that culling the mink would kill the business and the industry, ProPublica reported. Tom Peacock, an avian influenza researcher at the Pirbright Institute, said depopulation, meaning the culling of mink, typically happens quickly. He called the fact that it did not happen at the Utah farm “very concerning.”

The Utah bird-flu outbreak was not the first recent outbreak at a Utah fur farm. During the Covid-19 pandemic, nearly 10,000 mink in Utah died from the coronavirus, and quarantines were implemented at nine farms. A report in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases said the virus was likely transmitted to the animals from infected workers. A separate report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America said mink are very susceptible to infection with several viruses that also infect humans.

Officials reportedly also did not monitor the farm workers for symptoms despite CDC guidance to do so. ProPublica found two people who worked at the farm, one of whom had a red eye, and the CDC urges testing for that symptom. Farm owner Chad Fenn told ProPublica that the worker had dust in his eye and that the state health department did not recommend testing.

Price and the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Guardian could not immediately reach Fenn.

Nuzzo said, “I found them quite useful because it allowed us to push them and say, ‘Well, what about this?’, and to interrogate some of the ideas.” She said, “A lot is lost when that doesn’t happen … It might mean that things are going on that people don’t see or know about. It might also be that actions don’t get the scrutiny they deserve.”