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Victor was prepubescent when he was captured in 1800, but experienced puberty within a year or two. Subsequently, he then left civilization and fended for himself in the wild. According to Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, Victor was a normal child at birth but was neglected by his alcoholic parents from an early age. That variant had what the World Health Organisation described as “moderately decreased sensitivity to neutralising antibodies.” As a result, Denmark decided to cull its entire mink stock: more than 15 million mink.Victor is estimated to have been born around 1788. The virus strain circulating among those animals metastasised into the community: More than 200 human cases of the virus were linked to the farmed mink, including 12 with a unique variant of the virus that Danish officials worried could compromise future vaccine effectiveness. In Denmark, mink also sickened farm workers, according to genomic analysis. Yet the disease has not always spread only from infected farm workers to mink. In those cases, country officials said the mink are believed to have been sickened by farm workers. Spain and Greece also culled more than 100,000 of the animals at its infected farms. The Netherlands recently announced that it has completed culling its four million mink and shut down its mink industry permanently. And since this spring, millions of farmed mink have been killed to control the virus’s spread across Europe, including in Denmark, the continent’s largest mink pelt producer. Last week, Canada reported its first farmed mink outbreak, in Fraser Valley, British Columbia. The USDA says further efforts to prevent spread within the large North American wild mink population are warranted, though it has not announced a strategy for doing so. It’s unclear how the wild mink may have come into contact with infected mink on a fur farm. “This finding demonstrates both the importance of continuing surveillance around infected mink farms and of taking measures to prevent the spread of the virus to wildlife.” “Outbreaks at mink farms in Europe and other areas have shown captive mink to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, and it is not unexpected that wild mink would also be susceptible to the virus,” says USDA spokesperson Lyndsay Cole. Until now, however, no animals in the wild have been found to have it.
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Scientists have been racing to determine what other animals may be susceptible, paying particular attention to endangered species and those that may be able to pass it back to humans. The virus has also been found in a number of captive wild animals, including lions, tigers, and snow leopards, as well as in domestic dogs and cats. “There is currently no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is circulating or has been established in wild populations surrounding the infected mink farms,” the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) wrote in its alert, using the official name for the virus. This mink was trapped in the “immediate vicinity of one of the affected farms,” says Utah state veterinarian Dean Taylor, and was the only animal caught in the area to test positive. But until now, no wild mink cases had been detected, despite ongoing testing of mink, raccoons, skunks, and other animals around farms with infections. In the U.S., coronavirus outbreaks have been documented at 16 mink farms in Utah, Wisconsin, Oregon, and Michigan, with the most cases in Utah. The strain of the virus in the wild mink is “indistinguishable” from that in infected mink on farms around the state, according to the National Veterinary Services Laboratory, the USDA division that conducted the tests. A wild mink in Utah tested positive during screening of wildlife around fur farms with outbreaks, it says. The first known case of the novel coronavirus in a non-captive wild animal has now been confirmed, according to an alert issued by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).