Hello Wild Salmon People;
The work we have done together looking for ISA virus and making it public has prompted the Cohen Commission to reopen on the Thursday this week (Dec. 15, 16, 19). In preparation for this I have done a blog quoting government's fierce internal debate over importing Atlantics into BC. You can see there are heroes in DFO and the Ministry of Environment who were silenced by the looming threat of Trade Sanctions. Real or imagined you can see this pressure degraded the safeguards. Interestingly, first industry brought in Scottish eggs (1985), but stopped suddenly and lobbied for U.S. eggs. Large numbers of eggs poured in from the U.S. and then abruptly stopped. Industry then pressured DFO to allow Icelandic eggs. DFO drops the regulations further and eggs flood in from Iceland, and then abruptly stop in 2009. April 2010, the salmon farmers decide they don't want the provincial government auditing their farms for viruses. No matter whether we are talking about exotic or endemic viruses, salmon farms destabilize the relationship between pathogen and host. If commerce and not biology regulates how we deal with disease - we are in trouble.
I think it is important to recognize there have been and still are heroic efforts from within government to protect our fish from disease. Today, Dr. Sally Goldes who headed the provincial fish health lab stepped forward in the Times Colonist to say we never had effective measures against imported viruses. (see my blog). We need to support these people to represent our need for wild salmon.
I understand the Cohen Commission is refusing to allow live-streaming of this public inquiry. There are people who have stepped up to do this at no charge. You can voice an opinion on this:http://www.cohencommission.ca/en/submissions/SubmissionForm.php
Carla Shore carla.shore@cohencommission.ca 604-658-3646, Cell: 604-329-0975 Ms. Shore is only the messenger, you will need to convince Justice Bruce Cohen
This a public inquiry into a public resource, we are paying for the court time, the lawyers, the judge and the salaries of some of the people on the stand. It is open to the public who can afford to make the trip, so why can't everyone listen in as they did earlier this year? What about the people 900km up the Fraser River, don't they get the right listen too?
Check for times and location at cohencommission.ca go to "Calendar and Transcripts" - it is in a new location
I will be blogging daily at http://alexandramorton.typepad.com, there will be live-blogging at the salmon are sacred Facebook page, hopefully we can inspire Cohen to make this public Inquiry - public to the people of Canada.
There is no question we are in troubled times. But I think it is important to remember that the reason industry pressured government allow them to pour Atlantic salmon into the Pacific was to make money off the enormous capacity of the North Pacific to grow fish. If salmon farms contaminate these waters what is the point? They will lose what they came for, and we will lose what we have.
They can make deals, rationalize bad behaviour, give corporations more rights than local people, but if they destroy what they so blindly pursue - what is the point?
We need to find solid ground and stand on it. Salmon disease is not a federal secret. These hearings are very, very important.
Alexandra Morton
December 14, 2011
December 13, 2011
Disagreement over salmon virus in Canada
Activist scientist finds virus in fish, Canadian government does not
Posted on JUNEAU EMPIRE December 11, 2011 - 12:19am
By
An independent British Columbia researcher is accusing the Canadian government of covering up years of positive tests for the potentially deadly Infectious Salmon Anemia virus.
“Fish disease has become a federal secret in Canada,” fish researcher Dr. Alexandra Morton said. “I believe it is because it is everywhere and no one wants to admit it.”
Canadian officials have refuted Morton’s claims.
In a letter to Fisheries and Oceans Canada Minister Keith Ashfield, Morton said the Canadian government’s lack of action has failed its constituency.
“This has unacceptable biological, economic, international and market implications,” Morton said. “So we have stepped into the void you created. We will form a plan when all our results are in and we will give you direction in the New Year. Salmon diseases are no longer a federal secret. We will protect our fish. We are not going to beg help from you any longer.”
Dr. Gary Marty with the Canada Food Inspection Agency, the researcher who did the most recent ISAv test for the Canadian government, said Morton is not qualified to make the interpretations she does.
“She does not have advanced training in medicine or pathology,” he said. However, Marty said, he does have respect for “her powers of observation.”
“When she records something, I can use that, and helps me understand what is going on,” he said.
Activist scientist sounds the alarm
Morton is a researcher with the Raincoast Research Society. In her decades-long career as an activist scientist she has studied algal blooms and sea lice in BC waters and fought to end fish farms’ use of acoustic deterrence on sea mammals, including orca whales. Simon Fraser University awarded Morton and honorary doctorate of science.
Her 10-year-long study of sea lice, she said, prepared her for the ISAv fight. She said at first the Canadian government denied the sea lice problem. “Now it is very clear,” she said. So when she hears the government’s current denials of ISAv she said she believes she is seeing the same thing.
Recently Morton traveled to BC’s Fraser River, the site of a massive salmon collapse in 2009, to collect salmon samples to test for the virus. (The recent ISA scare prompted a commission looking into the Fraser River salmon collapse to reopen its investigation for three days in December to look into the possible role the virus may have had in the collapse. Find out more at www.cohencommission.ca)
Fraser River is located 600 kilometers south of River’s Inlet, the site where researchers found two sockeye salmon smolt in October that were suspected to carry the virus and possibly exhibiting signs of the disease.
Morton collected 10 salmon at Fraser River that had died before spawning. She sent the fresh samples to independent labs for testing.
“We found [the virus] in the heart of one of the coho and in the gills of a 25 pound king salmon,” Morton said. “This salmon was yellow.” She said she also found the virus in the gills of a chum salmon, and later in a sockeye.
“So far I’ve only got a positive test in salmon that have died before spawning, so you can’t call them healthy fish,” Morton said.
Morton sent her samples to independent testing facilities in Prince Edward Island, Canada, and Oslo, Norway. “I picked these labs because they are good at what they do,” Morton said. She said the scientists who tested her samples have received push back since releasing the results.
Morton said the Canadian government won’t acknowledge the results from the test she commissioned. Her explanation is not flattering to Canada’s leaders.
Morton said conflicting commercial interests may make the Canadian government hesitant to address the situation openly.
In Canada wild salmon are “in the way” of hydroelectric dams, resource development and fish farms, she said. Therefore, Morton said, she doesn’t think the government has much reason or impetus to respond. “Really, Canadian fish are dying due to a lack of political will,” she said.
Previous test by a post-graduate student researcher wasn’t published
This is not the first time a researcher has found the virus in Canada’s salmon. A post-graduate student named Molly Kibenge studied hundreds of salmon for the virus in 2004. Her results found 115 positive results for the virus in Pacific salmon out of a sample size of 460. The virus was found in 36 out of 116 chinook salmon tested, 15 out of 88 pink salmon and 64 out of 103 sockeye salmon. The test has been called into question because all 64 of the sockeye that tested positive came from the same location. The virus was also found in one Atlantic salmon out of a sample size of two.
Kibenge’s finding were initially not published.
However, with the recent possible instance of the virus, Kibenge asked Canadian officials to publish her original findings.
Her request was turned down due to ongoing tests and an ongoing inquiry into the Fraser River salmon collapse called the Cohen Commission, according to Dr. Simon Jones, Aquatic Animal Health Station.
“I will wait to hear the outcome of these processes before further discussion on a 7-year-old manuscript," Jones said.
Some of Kibenge’s results have been confirmed by the Atlantic Veterinarian College, according to Morton.
The most recent flare-up of public interest into the virus stated in October of this year when the virus may have been detected in two juvenile sockeye salmon north of Vancouver Island at Rivers Inlet which empties into Queen Charlotte Sound.
Several species of salmon and trout can carry the deadly virus without showing symptoms, according to a report by Iowa State’s Center for Food Security and Public Health.
Infected fish are highly contagious, whether wild of farmed, and can transmit the disease to and between Atlantic salmon with devastating effects. The disease, also known as hemorrhagic kidney syndrome, can be difficult to detect in fish farms and can cause nearly 100 percent mortality. There is no treatment.
Although Pacific salmon may carry the virus without mortal effects, it is possible for a virus to undergo deadly mutations. The report’s authors compared this to outbreaks of highly virulent strains of avian influenza. ISA virus does not transmit to humans.
The 48 salmon smolt tested did not show signs of disease, said Dr. Ted Meyers, Chief Pathologist for Alaska Department of Fish and Game in an earlier interview. They were collected for routine stomach analysis, he said. The test for infectious salmon anemia was secondary. “We are concerned and we want to see further testing, but it is an Atlantic virus and Pacific salmon are resistant to this virus. So it is not time to panic,” Meyers said.
Since that interview the Canadian government has conducted further tests. Researchers at the Canada Food Inspection Agency reported they did not find any sign of ISA virus in these tests.
“The virus is widely reported in Atlantic salmon stocks in Norway, so there is no reason it would not have come into BC in the tens of millions of eggs imported, Morton said. Unless we are very smart about this, use everything known and act wisely, we will pay the price,” she said.
Both Morton and Canadian officials are bewildered by the others’ findings.
The Canada Food Inspection Agency has not had a single positive test for the virus in over 7,000 tests in the last decade including 1,600 in 2011, much of which came in the last couple months.
“Yet,” Morton said “I’m finding it all over the place.”
Morton believes the lack of government findings is due to the testing procedure it uses. “If it mutates a little you won’t be able to detect the virus,” she said.
Canadian government finds no virusMarty, the Canada Food Inspection Agency researcher, said Morton’s claims are off base. He uses as an example Morton’s claim that the 2,000 “classic ISAv” lesions — Marty says it is closer to 1,300 — found in Department of Fish and Oceans routine salmon testing are proof of government incompetence.
He compared Morton’s attribution of the lesions to ISAv to blaming a dry cough on Avian influenza.
“Just because these fish have a common symptom doesn’t mean they have an uncommon, in the Pacific, disease,” Marty said. “What is a very mild change Morton attributes to a severe disease brought on by this virus.”
However, Marty said the finding should not be dismissed. “Some of those are real lesions, something is happening here,” he said.
Is it ISAv?
“If [World Organization for Animal Health] can detect it, we should be able to detect it,” Marty said.
Marty also said it is too early to announce the World Organization for Animal Health’s finding.
“What we have is some positive PCR tests,” Marty said. “It’s easy to get a false positive.”
Researchers use the polymerase chain reaction test to detect viruses like ISAv. It is the test Marty used to produce his negative ISAv results. However, Marty said the tests detects “only a very small segment of the entire virus genome — they do not detect the entire genome.”
Therefore a second procedure is needed to sequence a complete genome to determine if the “piece of (genetic material) detected by the test really is the virus as opposed to some other material that also contains the same small piece of (genetic material).
Marty warns that PCR tests are highly sensitive and contamination might occur.
“When I see PCR positive results for a disease not known to be in BC, in a species not known to be susceptible to the disease, and the fish had no clinical signs (or “classic lesions”) of the disease, I suspect that the PCR results are false positives until proven otherwise,” he said.
Marty said researchers need to be cautious with reacting to preliminary findings. There is no cure for salmon anemia and decimation is only option to stop the spread of the disease in Canada’s farmed Atlantic salmon population.
“Some of these farms have millions of stock,” Marty said. “You’d pretty much have to cull them all.”
Fish farmers have learned to live with the virus in recent years.
“When you have well-managed fish populations even when they get really highly virulent forms of ISA it doesn’t‚ result in much mortality.” ISA is kind of like a flu virus and behaves very much like that.
Chile’s production is going back up to its pre-breakout production of Atlantic salmon, Marty said. Norway and Chile control ISA through vaccination.
High costs from Chilean outbreak
“Maine spent $8 million unsuccessfully trying to get rid of it. Chile lost $2 billion to ISA virus, recently, some industry insiders say, because they did not act fast enough,” Morton said.
“When I read about Chile I feel like we are marching down the road again.”
In the beginning, they said things like, “Looks like ISA, but we can’t get it in all the tests, and it looks different than Norway.” Nobody was prepared for how fast it spread.”
Morton recommends Alaska test its major rivers and hatcheries for ISAv and put pressure on the Canadian government.
Alaska has an advantage in the ISA fight due to its concerned D.C. Delegation, Morton said.
“Let’s check the hatcheries, let’s check the fish farms, let’s find out what this thing really is and what is going on.”
“I know Alaska a doesn’t want to be an ISA zone,” Morton said. “But it can not ignore it.”
“It’s containable if you catch it before it becomes virulent. If it mutates and starts killing salmon all we can do is sit back and watch it rip through the population,” Morton said. “If we don’t do everything we can, then we deserve what we get.
• Contact Russell Stigall at russell.stigall@juneauempire.com or call 523-2276.
December 12, 2011
December 11, 2011
New salmon cancer scare
The Scottish salmon farming industry faces a sales ban and fines after traces of a cancer-risk chemical was discovered in the fish.
Malachite green, a cheap disinfectant treatment for eggs and young fish, was banned in June 2002 but traces of the chemical are still being found in up to 19 per cent of farmed salmon.
The EU has threatened legal proceedings against Britain that could result in a ban or a fine unless the contamination is stopped.
The industry is still reeling from a U.S. study published last week, suggesting people should not eat Scottish farmed salmon more than three times a year.
It identified a higher cancer risk due to the salmon being contaminated with industrial and agricultural pollutants given to them in suspect feed. Malachite green, which is actually a fabric dye, has been used by fish farmers for decades as a treatment for dealing with parasites and fungal infections.
The salmon and trout farming industries have routinely used the chemical in the past because it is much cheaper than officially approved medicines prescribed by vets.
However, there are concerns that malachite green - and the metabolised chemical leucomalachite green - are dangerous toxins.
The presence of the toxins has remained relatively constant despite the 2002 ban. Official monitoring puts contamination levels at 20 per cent of fish in 2001 and 15 per cent in 2002. It was 19 per cent in the first three months of last year, although the average for the year is thought to have been around 15 per cent.
The Salmon Farm Protest Group spokesman, Don Staniford, said: "I would not be surprised if some Scottish fish farmers were still using malachite green.
"Consumers should not be subjected to such a suspect substance."
Scottish Quality Salmon, which represents three-quarters of the country's fish farmers, said none of its members use the chemical.
It said positive tests were being found in very few adult fish, which may have been legally treated with the chemical while young some two years ago. It dismissed the allegations as "scaremongering" and "completely without foundation".
Read more on The Daily Mail
December 10, 2011
December 9, 2011
December 8, 2011
Did Canada cover up deadly salmon virus?
Source and link direct to this great article from 1.12.11 - Los Angeles times
Did Canada cover up deadly salmon virus?
Report suggests yes!!
Call it Salmongate. The deepening controversy over who knew what and when about a deadly virus that may or may not have been detected in West Coast salmon would be obscure fodder for biologists if there weren't so much at stake -- the health of the West's dwindling stocks of wild salmon, for one. And Canada's $2.1-billion fish farming industry.
Salmon advocates have been reeling for weeks over hotly contested reports that the infectious salmon anemia (ISA) virus that has devastated fish stocks in Europe and South America had been detected in three British Columbia wild salmon -- findings that the Canadian government says have not been confirmed.
Now comes news that signs of the virus actually were detected much earlier, in 117 wild salmon from the Bering Sea in Alaska to Vancouver Island in Canada as long ago as 2002. But it appears that the Canadian government neither fully investigated the findings nor, when they emerged again recently, allowed them to be published.
The report on those earlier tests, now titled "Fishyleaks," surfaced on the Superheroes4salmon blogthis week, which detailed studies conducted by staff at the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Atlantic Veterinary College at the University of Prince Edward Island.
"Such non-disclosure by the Canadian government constitutes a breach of Canada’s international obligations to the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), trade partners and to its neighbors in the United States, Russia and Japan who have valuable wild salmon resources," said the blog, which also posted copies of an email from a Canadian government official declining permission to publish the data because they had not been confirmed.
The new reports are proving worrying for biologists up and down the West Coast, not to mention salmon fishermen in Alaska, who have long seen farmed salmon as a threat to the wild salmon stocks that are the crown jewels of that state's multibillion-dollar fishing industry.
Salmon farms crowd fish in close quarters, where infestations such as sea lice can spread quickly and, conservationists and fishing industry leaders fear, potentially jump to wild fish stocks. The ISA outbreak led to a 70% decline in Chile's farmed salmon production in 2007, though the virus is harmless to humans.
"When Alaska banned fish farms, the top reason was to avoid disease spreading to our wild stocks. What was at stake was no mystery: Norway had already killed entire populations of wild fish due to parasites and disease introduced by imported salmon," Dale Kelley, executive director of the Alaska Trollers Assn., wrote in a recent guest column for the Vancouver Sun.
"Our state wisely chose to avoid such risk; yet folks to the south of us put us squarely in the path of what Alaskans feared the most," he added. "If the Canadian government has information to quell our concerns, we have not yet heard it. If they have an effective plan of action, we have not yet seen it."
Canadian fisheries officials said in a statement last month that the new reports of infectious salmon anemia detected in British Columbia salmon "have not yet been verified by federal officials through established processes," and initial investigations showed that "proper protocols may not have been followed" in the tests that produced the findings.
"Over the past two years, over 500 wild and farmed salmon in British Columbia have been tested by Fisheries and Oceans Canada. From 2003 to 2010, the British Columbia Ministry of Agriculture operated a scientifically designed surveillance program that tested over 4,700 farmed salmon in BC," the agency said. "Again, all samples were negative for the virus. In short, there has never been a confirmed case of ISA in British Columbia salmon -- farmed or wild."
The old report causing all the controversy this week appears to date from 2004, when researchers said that the virus was successfully sequenced, and that 22% of more than 500 fish sampled had tested positive. It said 10 out of 37 chinook caught "inside east Alaska" tested positive.
The results could be good news in some respects, in that the findings could indicate that wild salmon along the Pacific Coast are resistant to a devastating outbreak.
But government overseers in Canada weren't convinced by the results, and said so when they declined to allow the old study to be published this fall when news of the recent virus findings came to light.
In a Nov. 4 email to Molly Kibenge, one of the researchers who did the original study while working in 2002 as a visiting fellow at a government lab on Vancouver Island, Fisheries and Oceans Canada biologist Simon R. M. Jones pointed out that the agency had disagreed from the beginning that the findings pointed conclusively to infectious salmon anemia.
"For example, all attempts to isolate the virus into cell culture failed," he noted. He said the agency is now conducting further detailed tests to make a conclusive determination.
"I will wait to hear the outcome of these processes before further discussion on a 7-year-old manuscript," he wrote. "Consequently, I do not give permission to submit this work, whether in this manuscript or any other, for publication."
In a written statement to The Times on Thursday, Michelle Imbeau of the Canadian fisheries agency said government biologists had indeed conducted follow-up tests on the original 2002 findings, which she said were achieved by way of a "highly sensitive" test that often produces false positives.
"Appropriate follow-up was done on Dr. Kibenge's work using more thorough testing procedures and, based on the best science available, it was concluded that her results had produced a false positive and there was no presence of ISA in her samples," Imbeau said.
But the Fishyleaks report cried cover-up.
"Someone should be going to jail over this," John Werring of the David Suzuki Foundation, a Vancouver, Canada-based conservation organization, said in an email quoted in the Fishyleaks report. "Never in my over 20 years of doing my work have I seen such duplicity by our government. The closest thing I can relate to is when whistle-blowers in the U.S. released documents showing that tobacco companies knew their product harmed people... Appalling!"
U.S. officials already are hurrying to conduct studies of their own, with federal legislation passed earlier this month ordering quick studies of what threat infectious salmon anemia poses to fish stocks and how, if necessary, to stop its spread.
"These troubling reports reinforce the need for a coordinated, multinational strategy to control the spread of this virus threat," said U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who co-sponsored thelegislation. "American and Canadian scientists need to have access to all relevant research on this deadly virus. We can’t afford to leave the Pacific Northwest’s fishery jobs at risk."
In the meantime, some U.S. biologists are troubled that news of the earlier Canadian findings is only now coming to light.
"We had no knowledge of any of this," Jim Winton, a top fish virologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Seattle, told the Seattle Times after reviewing the old report. "No one ever revealed that there was a publication that was ready to go to a journal or that the data were as compelling as they appear to be. This is puzzling and very frustrating. It's unfortunate that this information was not available sooner. This should have been followed up years ago."
"We had no knowledge of any of this," Jim Winton, a top fish virologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Seattle, told the Seattle Times after reviewing the old report. "No one ever revealed that there was a publication that was ready to go to a journal or that the data were as compelling as they appear to be. This is puzzling and very frustrating. It's unfortunate that this information was not available sooner. This should have been followed up years ago."
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