Late this summer, news reports announced that cases of Covid had been found at two Utah mink farms.
The Utah Department of Agriculture is taking the lead on information here, and Summit County Health Director Rich Bullough says the cases are not in this county.
If any issues arise here, he said it may be a little challenging to figure out who has the authority to act.
Bullough said the Agriculture Department reported to State Health that at least five mink at two Utah farms were infected. Bullough said the mink had caught the virus from humans.
He said he doesn’t think there’s a high risk right now for Summit County.
“The majority of the mink farms, though, obviously are in the eastern part of the county, and the rates still remain low over there. So I think we’re at quite low risk. I don’t know exactly where these farms are, but one of the things mentioned was that they were in an area of relatively-high incidence of Covid. I don’t want to speculate on that. But they’re not here. They’re not in Summit County.”
He said that in Europe, the virus nearly wiped out the mink industry in a couple of countries. One notable example was Holland.
“And they’d gone in and culled apparently many, many of the mink, and by that, I mean terminated. And apparently the mink were carrying the disease without necessarily displaying symptoms. But the way they identified it initially was high mortality rates, abnormally high mortality rates in the mink. And so it is apparently fatal to at least some of them.”
If an outbreak appeared at mink farms in Summit County, we asked Bullough what role his department would have.
“Given a lack of evidence that it is the mink spreading the disease to humans, I don’t foresee that this Department of Health, Summit County, would play a large role in that. It is-ultimately mink farms are under the jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture. But obviously, this is a health issue. So that’s one of the things that certainly, if we were to have cases of this in mink in Summit, we’d need to figure out what our respective roles are, and importantly, who has the authority to do what. That’s been one of the great areas of confusion with Covid, unfortunately, is that the authorities to act are all over the place. Some of them are with federal agencies, some with state, some with local, some with school districts. And that’s been confusing to the public.”
Summit County Health Director Rich Bullough
