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In China, Farming Animals for Fur Provides Ideal Conditions for Virus Outbreaks
Animals farmed for their fur, like these foxes from a farm in China’s northeastern Liaoning province, can carry a number of viruses that infect people. Fur farms are typically poorly regulated and lax on biosafety measures. | Photo by Jane Qiu,
By Jane Qiu
February 9, 2026
Reporting for this story, originally published in Knowable Magazine, was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
A sharp, musky scent rushes over me as I step out of the taxi outside Mr. Wang’s house near Tong’erpu, in China’s northeastern Liaoning province. It’s one of the country’s largest fur-trading centers. Wang greets me, sporting a blue jersey and matching cap. “I’m about to feed the foxes,” he says.
In his courtyard, 600 Arctic foxes, housed in rows of elevated wire-meshed cages, eye me nervously. Wearing no mask, gloves or protective clothing, Wang moves down the rows, scooping a paste of fish, corn and animal bones into bowls in each cage. The animals, creamy white with short bushy tails, feast on the food amid a frenzied chorus of slurps and gulps.
Like many others in the region, Wang’s fox farm provides an essential supplement for a precarious farming livelihood. But the fur-farming business comes with risks of its own. The price of fur fluctuates greatly from year to year, Wang tells me. And mysterious diseases can strike with devastating force. A few years ago, Wang says, diarrhea wiped out hundreds of his foxes.
China is one of the world’s major fur producers—particularly of fox, mink and racoon dog pelts—alongside Europe and the United States. In 2021, China’s fur-farming industry employed around 6 million people and had an estimated value of US$61 billion.
The kinds of disease outbreaks Wang describes are commonplace, but before Covid-19 they were rarely reported, let alone investigated. Studies since the pandemic have found that some outbreaks, which can kill thousands of animals, were caused by a particularly worrisome virus that can cause severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS). In humans, this condition can bring about bleeding, vomiting, diarrhea and organ failure. It appears to be afflicting a growing number of people since it was first identified in 2009, says Yu Xuejie, a microbiologist at Wuhan University who discovered the virus that causes the disease. Last year alone, Yu adds, China reported roughly 5,500 confirmed cases—nearly triple the number recorded just five years earlier.
And the SFTS virus isn’t the only one associated with fur farming that has scientists worried. A recent study shows that other viruses capable of infecting people, including coronaviruses and influenza viruses, are widespread in fur animals. With crowded conditions, poor biosafety standards and little surveillance on fur farms, scientists like Eddie Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney in Australia and a coauthor of the study, warn that the industry is “spectacularly risky.”
The farms, says Holmes, could be the breeding grounds for the next pandemic.
The questions haunting scientists are urgent: How easily can viruses in fur animals spread? What illnesses could they ignite in people? And how are farming practices helping them along? Soon after my visit to Wang’s farm, outbreaks in both fur animals and humans on multiple farms began to provide clues.
Tracking the killer
Severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome is not new. Nearly 20 years ago, central China was gripped by waves of a mysterious disease that struck with fever, diarrhea and dangerously low platelet counts—killing nearly a third of the people it touched. “Family members were angry and took to the streets in protest,” demanding that the government uncover the cause of the new disease, recalls Yu, a former employee with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing.
In 2009, Yu led a team into central China to collect blood samples from patients with the unknown illness. Challenging the prevailing belief that a bacterium was to blame, he uncovered a novel RNA virus. His team detected the virus or antibodies against it (a sign of exposure) in 70 percent of hospitalized SFTS patients—evidence compelling enough for the scientists to conclude that this newly identified virus was behind the disease.
Most of the patients lived near forested areas thick with blood-sucking mosquitos and ticks. But when Yu’s team trapped nearly 6,000 mosquitoes, none carried the virus. The real menace, says Yu, surfaced in the ticks. Amongst those pulled off domestic animals, one in 20 tested positive.
Follow-up studies confirmed that Haemaphysalis longicornis, a tick capable of feeding on diverse hosts, is the primary vector of SFTS. Dozens of species, including rodents, birds, goats and cattle, carry antibodies to the virus, indicating past infection. The disease has since surfaced in people in other Asian countries, such as Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam, killing as many as one in five patients. Most SFTS cases occur in China, and between 1996 and 2023, there were more than three dozen clusters of cases in which infected people transmitted the virus to others.
Then, in fall 2023, word of fox die-offs on farms across eastern China began rippling across veterinarians’ social media feeds. One after another, foxes developed running noses, lost their appetite, passed black stools and then died, within days of first showing symptoms. On each farm, some housing as many as 11,000 foxes, scores of animals perished—in some cases a third of the facility’s creatures.
Shi Weifeng, a virologist at Shanghai Jiao Tong University of Medicine, sprang into action. Shi, whose research focuses on human diseases caused by pathogens from animals, dispatched his team to collect swabs and organ samples—spleen, intestines, lungs and kidneys—of sick or dead foxes on six farms in Shandong and Liaoning provinces, as well as samples from the farm environments, such as the sinks and animal feed.
Until recently, conventional wisdom was that most animals infected with SFTS showed only mild or no symptoms, says Keun Hwa Lee, a virologist at Hanyang University in Seoul. Yet all but one of the foxes Shi’s team tested were teeming with the virus, their bodies etched by the SFTS infection: organs swollen and mottled with hemorrhage, cells and tissues degenerated.
An analysis of 13 complete viral genomes sequenced from infected foxes found that they sorted into three subtly different but distinct groups. In some cases, the genomes had segments from different viruses—like Lego blocks clicked into new combinations—a reshuffling process known as reassortment. Reassortment, notes Shi, can generate variants that are more infectious, more deadly or both.
The team concluded that multiple lineages of the SFTS virus were circulating across eastern China, crossing into foxes again and again. They are less clear on how the animals got infected, because they found only one tick and it was virus-free.
Yet, around the same time that foxes in Shangdong and Liaoning were dying in droves, thousands of miles away in Finland, bird flu was spreading like wildfire from one fur farm to another. A study led by Lauri Kareinen, lead virologist at the Finnish Food Agency in Helsinki, linked the flu outbreaks to infected black-headed gulls in the region. The gulls, Kareinen explains, regularly flocked to the fur farms to feed—and most likely ignited the spark that set off the viral wildfire.
Kareinen wonders if SFTS outbreaks on farms in China might also have been sparked by infected birds or rodents that were drawn to the farms for scraps and contaminated the foxes’ feed. Another possibility is that some of the raw ingredients used in feed processing could have come from diseased animals. A recent study found that animals can shed the pathogen in their saliva and that healthy animals can fall ill after oral exposure.
Scientists suspect that once the virus gained a foothold in some animals, it could spread from one to another through close contact. A team that managed to isolate the virus from farmed minks observed: “When one caged mink suffers the disease and shows clinical symptoms, the minks nearby will show similar clinical symptoms and soon die.”
Human tolls
Spread of the SFTS virus from one individual to the next does not appear to be limited to nonhumans. In October 2023, not far from the farms where Shi’s team was probing the mysterious fox die-offs, a 60-year-old woman was struck with dizziness, nausea and vomiting. Within two days, she slipped into a coma; she died a week later. Around the same time, a coworker of hers was admitted to the same hospital with a “fever of unknown origin.” Laboratory tests delivered a chilling verdict: The women carried the SFTS virus. Both worked at a farm that housed more than 500 racoon dogs, 6,000 minks and 10,000 foxes.
A team led by Yang Zhenghui, an epidemiologist at the Weihai Heath Commission, descended on the farm like forensic investigators at a crime scene—interviewing workers, swabbing equipment and enclosures, combing for ticks and reconstructing the chain of events.
In October of 2023, two people who worked at a fur farm in Shandong province fell ill; one died a week after the onset of symptoms. An epidemiological investigation of the farm (enclosures and animals shown) found that the two workers, who did not wear protective gear on the job, were probably infected by the SFTS virus while skinning animals. | Photo by J. Li Et Al / Virology Journal 2024.
None of the 22 other workers had fallen ill. Yet half of them carried antibodies that pointed to past infection, and one worker tested positive for antibodies that were suggestive of an ongoing infection.
The team found no ticks on the farm or in the fields around the patients’ homes, and neither the women nor their colleagues recalled being bitten by a tick. By contrast, more than three quarters of the workers reported being bitten and splattered with blood while skinning the animals—grim evidence that, despite industry guidelines, some fur animals in China are still skinned without first being killed by electrocution.
Fur farming is poorly regulated in China, says Peter Li, an expert on wildlife policy at the University of Houston-Downtown in Texas. In Europe and the United States, enforcement can also be lax on protective measures, though some places have made improvements since the Covid-19 pandemic. Yang’s team found that the sickened workers had very little knowledge about how to protect themselves from possible diseases while on the job, including when they skinned animals. Samples taken from the skinning area, including blood from two foxes and swabs from the ground and a trash bin, were positive for the SFTS virus. Four of six viral genomes sequenced — one fox sample and three environmental swabs—were 99.9 percent identical to one another and to those from the two patients, pointing to a shared source.
Yang and his colleagues, who did not respond to Knowable’s requests for an interview, hypothesized in their report that the virus carried by the animals might have become aerosolized during the skinning process, exposing workers through inhalation.
Wen Hongling, a public health expert at Shandong University in Jinan who was not involved in the work, says the scenario is plausible: Beneath the animals’ skin lies a dense network of fluids and blood vessels, and the act of skinning can turn them into a fine, invisible mist that lingers in the air and can slip into workers’ lungs. Her studies have shown that mice exposed to such aerosols become infected with the SFTS virus, which then takes hold and replicates in their lungs.
Ticking time bomb
The SFTS story still contains mysteries, says Lee. The repeated die-offs on Chinese fur farms, for instance, struck him as “unusual,” given that the vast majority of infected animal species exhibit few symptoms. Regardless of what made the infections so lethal in fur animals, the story serves as a sobering cautionary tale. Researchers wonder what other deadly viruses might be lurking in these poorly regulated farms.
Holmes and his collaborators in China and elsewhere have uncovered a troubling picture. In one survey, which sampled 461 diseased fur animals across China, the researchers identified nearly 40 viruses with high potential to infect other animals, including people—nearly half of them in Shandong, home to the country’s largest producer of mink and fox furs. A separate study, which sampled 1,941 game animals across the country, found what looks like cross-species jumps of coronaviruses, including four canine coronaviruses in raccoon dogs suffering from diarrhea.
Equally troubling, says Holmes, are the documented instances of “zero biosafety” with farmed animals, creating the perfect gateway for these viruses to cross over into people. In a video captured by his Chinese collaborators, farmers were seen handling raccoon dogs stricken with severe gastric infection—using nothing but their bare hands.
While an increasing number of countries have banned fur farming since the Covid-19 pandemic, out of both animal rights and public health concerns, some scientists remain cautious about advocating for outright bans. In some parts of the world, says Kaneinen, fur farming is deeply rooted in culture and family tradition; in others, it provides a vital source of income. Some argue that a blunt ban ignores these realities and could drive the industry underground—where it would be even harder to monitor and potentially more dangerous.
A more realistic solution, researchers say, is better regulation and a massive improvement in animal welfare in Chinese fur farms. After the bird flu outbreaks in 2023, Finland introduced a series of mandatory measures to make fur farming safer, including installing nets to keep out birds, keeping the fur animals indoors, reducing cage size, and enforcing the use of personal protective equipment. Kareinen and his colleagues also identified the skinning process as “the riskiest phase of the operation,” where biosafety measures should be enforced most rigorously.
Also vital, Holmes adds, is regular surveillance of the pathogens circulating in fur animals and the humans who work with them. Without such measures, if fur animals were to trigger a major epidemic, he says, “we would have completely failed as a society—absolutely and utterly failed.”
Back in Tong’erpu, two foxes clash over feed, their bodies colliding with a metallic rattle against the wire cage that houses them. Wang laments that fur prices have yet to recover since the pandemic, leaving him feeling the pinch. This may be part of a long-term trend that sees the appetite for fur dwindling, both in China and worldwide. Some believe that fur farming, rather than being forced out, will simply fizzle out on its own.
As I walk through the farm, a cold shiver runs down my spine. Every cage could be a ticking time bomb, and the only question is whether one will detonate before the industry itself withers away.
Exposing the Big Game 