George Monbiot: Bird flu has circulated on a Utah mink farm since August

Avian flu has been present on a mink farm in Utah since August, and the official response has been to keep the farm open, the workers untested and the outbreak quiet. According to a ProPublica investigation, public health officials never tested the farm workers — who handle the infected animals every day and are often bitten or scratched — because the state agriculture department complained that farmers were annoyed by the testing. Utah has not declared an emergency; officials reasoned that doing so might alert animal rights activists.

George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian, argues that the farm is not a local story but the most plausible origin of the next pandemic. Mink are fed on the offcuts of chickens, cows and other livestock — precisely the material in which new viral variants develop — and they readily host both avian and human influenza at the same time. When the two viruses meet in one animal they can exchange genetic material and turn a bird disease into a human one. Monbiot warned in 2023 that mink farms could scarcely be better designed to produce lethal plagues; the disease in question, H5N1, has killed nearly half of all people known to have caught it since 1997.

Human-to-human transmission of the current strain remains extremely low, which is why the mixing-vessel farm is the hinge of the risk. The first US death from avian flu this year has just been announced; the victim caught it from an infected dairy herd, not from mink.

The state's handling has been organized around the farmer rather than the public. Utah's state veterinarian, Amanda Price, described the outbreak as devastating — "this is his life's work that he's seeing be destroyed" — and said there were few options "other than kind of sitting and waiting and seeing what happens". Her threshold for a different response was explicit: "If we started seeing people actively dying from this, obviously that would change how we respond to this."

Culling the mink would kill the farmer's business; keeping them alive costs the farmer nothing and leaves the risk — which Monbiot sizes at eight billion people — with everyone else. Denmark and the Netherlands learned those terms during covid, when outbreaks on their own mink farms forced mass culls. Utah's officials have been content with them: testing annoyed the farmer, and an emergency declaration might have alerted animal rights activists.

Monbiot wants a global treaty to ban mink farming. The threshold Utah's state veterinarian has named for acting differently is people actively dying — and of everyone known to have caught this virus since 1997, nearly half have done exactly that.