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community weblog
Incompetence, Tempered Only By Carelessness
ProPublica reports on a Utah mink farm that may have created the perfect environment for bird flu to make the jump to human transmission and the public health officials who are just letting nature take its course.
posted by Very Much A Work In Progress on Oct 24, 2026 at 10:35 AM
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I'm gonna take a wild leap into a hot take and say mink farms should not exist.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 10:51 AM
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"A fur trade representative warned Price that doing so would kill the business and, ultimately, the industry."
Aw shucks, you guys! Better to protect the profit of a luxury item that relies on animal torture than protect humanity from another pandemic!
posted by supermedusa at 10:57 AM
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I read this earlier today, and what struck me was not so much incompetence, but instead a lack of rigorous curiosity. Mink farms in the EU have been culled at a single case of bird flu in the herd. We have precedent here for chickens - a single case and the entire flock is destroyed.
Yes, the US does not have established protocols for mink farm illness outbreaks, but that's due to not considering the possibility, not an indication that no action is required.
I'm baffled by the thought process, which seems to be, "I understand the immediate consequence of culling," and not, "what is the potential large-scale risk of this situation." And - the workers, too - the same "We'll take action after someone dies." It's bathos writ large.
posted by Silvery Fish at 11:19 AM
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Well now I have read the whole article, and I encourage everyone to do so. It is TERRIFYING. It's bad enough that the mink farm is basically a crucible for disease transmission but the local, state, and USDA officials are all like "shrug, no biggie" or think it best to wait until actual human-to-human transmission has been found even though THEY ARE NOT TESTING. Yes, the best time to respond to a threat is after it's launched, not before.
posted by supermedusa at 11:20 AM
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posted by Very Much A Work In Progress
Eponyster...rifying
posted by jerome powell buys his sweatbands in bulk only at 11:21 AM
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"It has been devastating," Price told ProPublica of the outbreak and its impact on the farm's owner. "This [raising cute animals to kill them and make coats] is his life's work that he's seeing be destroyed."
Cry the big tear.
posted by pangolin party at 11:21 AM
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state veterinarian Amanda "you don't know my" Price
recently seen wearing a beautiful one-of-a-kind mink coat
posted by jerome powell buys his sweatbands in bulk only at 11:32 AM
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Well now I have read the whole article, and I encourage everyone to do so. It is TERRIFYING.
Yeah, when I read this (yesterday? it was going around Bluesky) it was all so ominous and awful that it served as my doomscrolling circuit-breaker for the day.
Couldn't help thinking about the forty-odd N95s in my cupboard. I'd been thinking they'd last a few more Covid infections and DIY dust-mask jobs. Might need some more sooner rather than later.
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."
The Best Characters Who Sacrificed Themselves, Ranked.
posted by rory at 12:30 PM
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But I'm supposed to hate every Chinese person because of how Wuhan city hall protected that wet market.
posted by ocschwar at 12:32 PM
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[One removed. The guidelines for violent language & imagery are in flux, but at the moment you definitely cannot wish graphic and specific violence on people, no matter how much they deserve it.]
posted by mod_adrienneleigh at 12:36 PM
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I'd better emphasise that my link to characters sacrificing themselves to save the world was about keeping the sacrifice of a mink farm in proportion. Sacrificing the farm you've built in order to save thousands of lives is a far easier way to become a hero.
The trouble is that those lives are being treated as abstract and hypothetical by everyone involved, thanks to years of increasing mistrust in science. But if the risk of triggering a pandemic is more than a tiny fraction of a percent, compensating one farmer to avoid it should be a no-brainer.
posted by rory at 12:52 PM
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So if this flu breaks containment and becomes a pandemic, will all the clever wags who thought Covid was just a big hoax refer to it as "Salt Lake Flu"?
posted by TedW at 12:56 PM
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I'd better emphasise that my link to characters sacrificing themselves to save the world was about keeping the sacrifice of a mink farm in proportion. Sacrificing the farm you've built in order to save thousands of lives is a far easier way to become a hero.
You make me wonder: are there already programs in place to compensate chicken farmers if they're ordered to destroy a flock? I have doubts if his business insurer (if he has one) would pay out for "there's no regulation requiring I do this but the rest of the planet does and I wanted to do the right thing." Not that there is any indication in the article that the principles involved are thinking that way. But if I was in their shoes this would be part of my calculus. In which case, perhaps this is the default "nothing to see here" response to bad things (measles, child sex abuse, etc.) we repeatedly see coming out of deeply conservative areas, especially religious-conservative communities.
posted by Silvery Fish at 1:30 PM
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Silvery Fish the chicken question (bok!) is covered in the article. There are laws requiring all chickens to be culled in case of bird flu, and the farmers are compensated. There is no such law in place for mink farming.
posted by supermedusa at 1:34 PM
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supermedusa - thanks for the correction! I was aware of the chicken-cull requirement , but must have glossed over the compensation bit.
posted by Silvery Fish at 1:39 PM
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Reminder that the Barrington People who now administer the American health system certainly lost loved ones during the covid pandemic. The difference between them and us is that they really didn't care.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 1:46 PM
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()
posted by clew at 1:57 PM
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I don't want us to make all the birds sick. Or even more of the birds than we do already.
posted by clew at 1:58 PM
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Yes, the US does not have established protocols for mink farm illness outbreaks, but that's due to not considering the possibility, not an indication that no action is required.
In Canada we have a year long fight that goes to the Supreme Court over culling an ostrich flock infected with H1N5. It was a major rallying point for the convoy jack offs.
Though The case got attention in the US, where politicians Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mehmet Oz offered sanctuary and research money for the ostriches.[ so could be worse.
posted by Mitheral at 5:24 PM
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So if this flu breaks containment and becomes a pandemic, will all the clever wags who thought Covid was just a big hoax refer to it as "Salt Lake Flu"?
posted by TedW at 12:56 PM on October 24
Don't worry, it s the CDC s job to find the nearest science lab and blame it on those people, who vote democrat and may be ethnic or women, anyway
posted by eustatic at 6:12 PM
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If we have another pandemic, we are virtually guaranteed that we won't be seeing any real measures taken to protect the public. No quarantining, no school closures, pretty much no restrictions... and we're going to find out what happens when people decide they don't want to leave home. Economically it will be a bigger disaster than COVID ever was.
posted by azpenguin at 10:42 PM
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Tom Peacock, an avian influenza researcher at the Pirbright Institute
Nominative determinism at work.
posted by bryon at 10:59 PM
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We vehemently refuse to wear N95 masks, improve ventilation, or even install air purifiers while COVID kills about a hundred thousand Americans each year, and the 'normal' flu kills another several tens of thousands. We remain firmly anchored on March 2020 as the only possible model for airborne virus prevention. Because March 2020 was unsustainable, we rationalize that airborne virus prevention is unsustainable. From there, our brain's amazing defense against cognitive dissonance does the rest.
The only lesson our leaders are learning from COVID is: "Denying there's a problem is the most popular policy." We can't reasonably expect them to do anything about bird flu when our COVID-revealed preference, reaffirmed daily, is Don't Look Up.
posted by Dimpy at 12:14 AM
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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, our investigation shows. The failure to act amounts to a cascade of missteps flu experts called "irresponsible" and "puzzling." One called it "playing with fire."
That's not puzzling. Today's government is full of people who would LOVE a bird flu outbreak.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:39 AM
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Short version of a story I've told before. Early 2010s paper on gain of function in flu, FBI redacted their bioengineering attempts. Those attempts failed and while the FBI also redacted whichever of the like 4 off-the-shelf mutagenesis kits they used in the Traditional Approach, they did not redact that the Old Ways are unnatural selection of particularly bad strains from particularly sick ferrets.
But hey, no one's selecting for the worst outcomes here at least, so we got that going for us..
posted by Slackermagee at 6:12 AM
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If this breaks containment, let's make sure the media calls it the Fenn-Price Utah Flu.
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:45 AM
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Slackermagee - you must be referring to the papers NSABB redacted back in 2011 which drew everyones attention to the issue. I still think about this thread on influenza transmissibility research in 2012.
Mustelid fur farming operations are essentially unregulated incidental bio-weapons facilities now.
posted by zenon at 10:02 AM
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[One removed. Derogatory terms for a group of coreligionists aren't okay, even if you think the religion sucks and even if the terms are obscure enough that most people don't know what they mean.]
posted by mod_adrienneleigh at 1:46 PM
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I don't want us to wipe out the wild mustelids either.
posted by clew at 2:28 PM
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(deleted)
posted by okayturnip at 12:29 AM
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