IPN - Fish Farms Cause Disease, Oct. 31, 2013

Fish farms have long been shown to be vectors for disease, but a recent PHD shows how stress causes reduced immune response and allows viruses to mutate, killing most of the farm. 65 Billion viruses per hour spill into surrounding waters and kill wild stocks.

Note: IPN means infectious pancreatic necrosis, a fatal disease.

See:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130102083557.htm.

Gadan discovered that stress lead to increased production of the stress hormone cortisol. This affects the immune system of the fish and weaker immunity makes them more susceptible to infections. The fact that stress can trigger an outbreak of IPN is corroborated by the experiences of many in the field.

"For the first time, she was able to prove that when infected salmon fry were exposed to stress, otherwise benign variants of the IPN virus changed into pathogenic viruses. In other words, stress lowers resistance, increases the "production" of IPN virus in the fish's internal organs and can lead to benign viruses changing into pernicious variants of the virus."

Farmed fish are always under stress in net-pens because of crowding. That is why one third to one half of all aquaculture products are lost to disease. Fish farms like to say that wild fish give them diseases as they are not affected by those diseases. This is wrong because wild fish are not under the stress that penned Atlantics are. This is the issue of saying that nature has a problem, when the only problem apparent is the stress caused by farmed fish in cages. They need to be on-land in recirculating closed systems.

Fish farms shed 65 Billion viral particles per hour into the surrounding water. In a conservatively estimated 2 knot tide, this means those particles being spread to 12 nautical miles in a six hour tide. Then, when the tide turns the other way, the continued leaching of viruses from the fish farms is carried another 12 nautical miles in the other direction. This means that in half a day viruses can be found in 24 nautical miles of ocean, infecting wild fish as they are carried along.

It is easy to understand that in a closed Sound - most fish farms are in bodies of water with one closed end - say Clayoquot Sound, why there are only 501 wild chinook left in six streams, and why fish farms are the likely final cause of extirpation of the Kennedy Lake sockeye run, once the most important commercial harvest on Vancouver Island, BC.

The fish farm explanation is a communications strategy that may convince those with little experience in fish farm issues. The much more believable conclusion, however, is that wild fish do not spread, say IHN, because there are no wild salmon left anymore in Clayoquot Sound. The fish farms have killed them all.

Do recall that Miller's science showed 25% of farmed chinook in Clayoquot Sound had ISA and HSMI in her Cohen Commission testimony. DFO is doing nothing about this problem other than passively watching wild BC salmon die.

Cohen Commission Report - One Year Later, Oct29, 2013

Cohen Commission One Year Later

You may have thought the Cohen report was a stone dropped through DFO leaving not a ripple. You’d be right. Google DFO Cohen Commission and what you find is everyone else in the country commenting loudly but diddly from DFO. Go directly to DFO and search, and the result is virtually the same. Page after page of nothing about the Commission – a year of silence so far.

At the time, DFO swamped the Commission with 500,000 documents. But after Cohen completed the intended sessions, the first result for the Atlantic Ocean fish farm disease ISA was demonstrated in two wild sockeye fry from Owikeno Lake, Rivers Inlet. Then one contentious document DFO failed to give Cohen was leaked: a study showing ISA in dozens of wild BC salmon, co-authored by Molly Kibenge, then with DFO in Nanaimo.

Cohen reopened the hearings and the full extent of fish farm diseases cascaded out. The science experts Miller, F. Kibenge and Nylund were interviewed. Miller’s work noted literally hundreds of thousands of fish with ISA and HSMI in Clayoquot Sound farmed chinook and SLV phenotype ‘viral signature’ back to 1988 in Fraser sockeye. Today there are only 501 wild chinook in Clayoquot and up to 90% of some Fraser sockeye subcomponents die of pre-spawn mortality.

With this knowledge in hand, the focus of the most important recommendations in the 1200 page tome – 75 in total, pages 105 – 115, Volume 3 – came to centre on constraining and removing Discovery Island fish farms near Campbell River, and for DFO to relinquish its conflicting role of supporting fish farms and put its full effort into implementing the 2005 Wild Salmon Policy, and the 1986 Habitat Policy. The report says there should be a new western director general charged with bringing back Fraser sockeye: http://www.cohencommission.ca/en/pdf/FinalReport/CohenCommissionFinalReport_Vol03_02.pdf#zoom=100.

Since then, the CFIA started a perfunctory job of looking at a few thousand fish, and saying it could not find ISA – this after Cohen testimony discredited its lab as not being able to find ISA. And DFO? It’s moved on to aquaculture. The performance measure, wait for it, is: A transparent regulatory regime for aquaculture in British Columbia and an Integrated Management Plan for finfish, and shellfish, by March 2014.

And the latest Norwegian related fish disease has just been shown to be present in BC wild salmon – PRV in Virology Journal, 2013. This may be worse than ISA, as it is the virus associated with heart and skeletal muscle inflammation – HSMI, developed circa 1999 in Norway. This is what those yellow pink salmon and the dying pre-spawn Fraser chum and sockeye are now being shown to have. Sadly, a large pre-spawn sockeye die-off occurred for the first time in the Skeena River in the past couple of months.

You can support the cost of testing all these fish, as hundreds of BC citizens, including me, are doing, on Alex Morton`s blog. She has this to say: ``The Commission changed my life, I am tracking three European viruses, publishing on them in top scientific journals and informing the scientific community.  Government is increasingly lagging behind and irrelevant to the science on salmon.``

I understand that Miller and Riddell (CEO of the Pacific Salmon Foundation), good smart people, will be co-authoring a report on fish farm/wild diseases. Unfortunately, for them and us, fish farms, DFO, and CFIA will be parsing the news releases.

560 Words

dcreid@catchsalmonbc.com

DFO’s aquaculture initiative: The British Columbia Aquaculture Program: http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/rpp/2013-14/SO1/so-rs-1.3.2-eng.html

Alex M`s blog: http://alexandramorton.typepad.com/alexandra_morton/2013/10/tracking-viruses-2013.html.

Three volume Cohen report: http://www.cohencommission.ca/en/FinalReport/.

DFO regarding BC Aquaculture: http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/rpp/2013-14/SO1/so-rs-1.3.2-eng.html. Sub-program 1.3.2 - British Columbia Aquaculture Program

Performance Measure. By March 2014: A transparent regulatory regime for aquaculture in British Columbia and an Integrated Management Plan for finfish, and shellfish.

The PRV paper: http://www.virologyj.com/content/10/1/230

 Whole-genome analysis of piscine reovirus (PRV) shows PRV represents a new genus in family Reoviridae and its genome segment S1 sequences group it into two separate sub-genotypes

Molly JT Kibenge^1†, Tokinori Iwamoto^1†, Yingwei Wang², Alexandra Morton³, Marcos G Godoy⁴⁵⁶ and Frederick SB Kibenge^1*

Miller Summary on Watershed Watch: http://www.watershed-watch.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Exh-1523-CAN006145.pdf.

65 On-land Fish Farm Systems, Oct 31, 2013

Go back and look at these previous posts.

This is the list of 65 different on-land fish farms comprising some 8100 on-land farms around the world that I have found: http://fishfarmnews.blogspot.ca/2012/01/key-document-34-mostly-on-land-closed.html.

This is a list of more on-land fish farms: http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1880129387856188740#editor/target=post;postID=254807261999628982;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=9;src=postname

These posts also contain the technical papers showing that on-land fish farms make more money than the Norwegian-derivatives do in the ocean with their high environmental cost.

Here is a new, and fair comparison of on-land recirculating system versus in-ocean net-pen. It says on land is cheaper: http://tidescanada.org/wp-content/uploads/files/salmon/workshop-sept-2013/NEWD1-11TrondRostenandBrianVinci.pdf.