January 28 Sweden announced on the 27th that it would ban the artificial breeding of mink at the end of this year due to concerns that the new virus mutation may aggravate the coronavirus crisis.
Ann Lindberg, director-general of the Swedish National Veterinary Institute, said at a press conference on the 27th that mink cultured in an individual-intensive environment provides ideal conditions for the virus to reproduce and spread widely and poses risks to animals and public safety.
“We have gradually increased the requirements for biosafety of mink farms and decided to take more restrictions, on the one hand, to prevent more farms from being infected, and on the other hand, to prevent the virus from spreading to people again,” said Kristina Nudin, the director of the Swedish National Agricultural Agency, at a press conference on the same day. “
The Swedish government announced that it had commissioned the National Veterinary Institute and the Agricultural Bureau to conduct inspections of Swedish livestock to reduce the risk of animals contracting the novel coronavirus and proposed further measures to minimize the risk of human and animal transmission.
Sweden first found a mink infected with the novel coronavirus in late October last year. But unlike Denmark, the country’s mink farms have not detected a mutant COVID-19.
The Danish government announced in early November that it had decided to kill about 17 million mink raised in the country in light of the multiple cases in which minks have spread mutant coronavirus to people.
According to the latest data of the Swedish Public Health Agency, as of the 27th, Sweden had a total of 560,472 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 11,425 deaths.
