Spain orders cull of nearly 100,000 farmed mink after animals test positive for Covid-19

The Department of Agriculture, Livestock and Environment of Spain’s Aragon area mentioned in an announcement on Thursday that it had ordered the slaughter of the 92,700 mink after seven staff on the farm examined positive for Covid-19 and the animals have been discovered to be contaminated with the coronavirus.

As a precaution the division shut down the farm, in Teruel, jap Spain, on May 22, for monitoring earlier than conducting a quantity of checks at random, which initially returned a destructive end result.

However, subsequent checks, the newest of which was July 7, confirmed 78 out of 90 animals examined — equal to 87% of the pattern — had turn out to be contaminated with the coronavirus.

In the assertion, the division mentioned no conclusions may very well be drawn as as to whether “there is human-to-animal transmission or vice versa,” and that “no abnormal behavior has been detected in the animals nor has there been an increase in mortality in them.”

However, it mentioned all mink on the farm could be slaughtered as a preventative measure.

Can animals unfold Covid-19 to people?

This just isn’t the primary mink farm to have seen a coronavirus outbreak. In May, Dutch authorities introduced mandatory testing at all mink farms in the Netherlands after they mentioned they believed a mink might need contaminated a human with Covid-19.

The testing has led to the culling of as much as a million mink within the nation at two dozen farms, in accordance with animal welfare charity Humane Society International.

“On the basis of new research results from the ongoing research into Covid-19 infections at mink farms, it is plausible that an infection took place from mink to human,” the Dutch authorities mentioned in an announcement on the time. “It also appears from this research that minks can have Covid-19 without displaying symptoms.”

The Dutch authorities additionally mentioned it believed cats may play a role in the spread of the virus between farms. “Ongoing research shows the viruses at two of the infected farms are very similar,” the assertion mentioned. Covid-19 was present in three out of 11 cats at one mink farm, it mentioned.

The virus has been seen in a range of different animals, including a number of tigers in New York’s Bronx Zoo in April and a dog in Hong Kong.

According to the World Health Organization, whereas it isn’t doable to find out exactly the supply of the virus, it most certainly originated in bats. However, extra analysis must be performed to determine how the virus potentially spreads from animals to humans because the position animals play within the unfold of the virus remains unclear.

CNN’s Mick Krever, Rob Picheta and Julia Hollingsworth contributed to this story.