There, mink raised for their fur are dying from bird flu – a virus considered one of the most likely causes of the next new pathogen to rampage round the world.

While scientists have long recognised the pandemic potential of bird flu, the presence in minks takes the threat status to the next level, says Professor Wendy Barclay, a virologist at Imperial College London. “This creates an even higher risk to humans than before,” she said.

That is because the nose and lungs of minks are similar to those of humans – so much so that the closely related ferrets are often used in flu research, as substitutes for people.

While for most people, flu is relatively mild, the infection causes a surge of deaths every winter. And every so often, the virus undergoes some major genetic changes leading to a higher toll than usual, which gets called a pandemic flu.

The most infamous flu pandemic happened after the First World War, but there have been three others since, with the last one in 2009.

Flu also circulates in wild birds, and in 2021, a new strain of bird flu emerged that caused die-offs in various bird species around the world, and warnings to the public to avoid touching dead or dying wild birds.

Bird flu has occasionally spread to poultry farms, leading to mass culls, as well as some dairy farms in the US, although the cattle are not culled because they generally recover.

So far, there have been a small number of farm workers who have caught bird flu from animals, including a few deaths, but in most the illness has been mild. Because the virus is adapted to birds, this strain of flu does not seem to spread easily from person to person.

But the mink farm outbreak, which has been going on since at least August, has got scientists worried, because of the potential for the virus to mutate there, to become more deadly and easier to spread to humans.

How the virus could evolve

“Minks are mammals. And the cells in their respiratory tract are similar to humans,” says Professor Mark Woolhouse, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Edinburgh.

Some research, prior to the case on the mink farm, has suggested that possibly one genetic change to bird flu strains found on US dairy farms could improve the chances of transmission to humans.

Another worry is that the mink could be perfect incubators, allowing different flu strains to swap genes. Called reassortment, this process is known to have triggered previous human pandemics, including the one in 2009. Mink can harbour both human and bird flu strains.

The fact this mink outbreak is happening in autumn, when human seasonal flu rises, is also a red flag, says Dr Simon Williams, a public health researcher at Swansea University. “It increases the risk of a virus with pandemic potential reassorting in somebody working on that farm who has seasonal flu,” he said.

Flu pandemic preparations

The UK Health Security Agency declined to comment on whether it had taken any specific measures in response to the mink outbreak when asked by The i Paper. But the agency’s Dr Richard Puleston said: “UKHSA has established systems in place for detection of human cases of avian flu and stands ready to initiate an appropriate public health response should it be needed.”

The Department of Health and Social Care periodically runs pandemic preparedness exercises, where the government and NHS bodies war game how they would respond. The last one was held a year ago.

One notable failure at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic was that the NHS lacked supplies of personal protective equipment for medics, like masks, gloves and gowns.

But as of 2025, the NHS had £25m worth of PPE stockpiled. It is periodically used up and restocked, to make sure items don’t go out of date, a minister said in response to a parliamentary question.

Other vital tools in a flu pandemic would be vaccines and diagnostic tests. While millions of the most vulnerable people get vaccinated for seasonal flu every year, this is unlikely to give much protection against a new pandemic strain, says Dr Simon Clarke, a microbiologist at the University of Reading.

“I’d expect it would give a little bit of cross-protection, but it wouldn’t be enough,” Clarke added.

Using standard methods, it would take six months for manufacturers to make vaccines tailored to any new strain.

But there could be much speedier production, within six weeks, of a new pandemic flu vaccine based on mRNA, the same technology behind the Covid vaccines, made by Moderna.

Vaccines based on mRNA give instructions to our cells to make a virus protein. This “trains” the immune system to react against that protein by making antibodies that battle it.

An mRNA vaccine to seasonal flu was approved in the US for the first time this year. Although it is not being used in the UK, Moderna recently opened an mRNA vaccine manufacturing site in Oxfordshire, which it says could potentially make 250 million vaccine doses a year.

Rapid tests a ‘game changer’

The value of diagnostic tests also shouldn’t be overlooked, says Woolhouse. They are essential for medics to be able to speedily treat and isolate patients, and gave people more control over their health during Covid. “They were a game changer,” he says. “They allowed us to manage the epidemic as individuals.”

Test kits for seasonal flu are already available, but it is unclear if they would react against bird flu and could not distinguish it from seasonal flu. The tests would need to be tweaked and tested against bird flu, Woolhouse added.

As a preparedness exercise, he wants the Government to task researchers with developing bird flu test kits as fast as possible.

“Forget the paper exercises: let’s do an exercise now and see if we can produce lateral flow tests [against bird flu] in 30 days,” he says.

“That would stress-test our actual pandemic preparedness as opposed to our paper pandemic preparedness.”