ISA in B.C.?
Blog: Salmon Farm Science, Oct. 17, 2011
There is some explosive news unfolding at the moment.
According to a press release from SFU, “The highly contagious marine influenza virus, Infectious Salmon Anaemia (ISA) has for the first time been officially reported after being found in the Pacific on B.C.’s central coast.”
Wow! Really!? According to the press release, “The virus was found in two of 48 sockeye smolts collected as part of a long-term study, led by Routledge, on the collapse of Rivers Inlet sockeye populations. Dr. Fred Kibenge of the ISA reference laboratory at the Atlantic Veterinary College in P.E.I. made the diagnosis and notified the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) of the positive results for the European strain of ISA virus.”
That’s a serious claim to make. Has it been confirmed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency? Apparently not, we hear.
Yet there is a press conference, a media release and a story already in the Vancouver Sun about this proclaiming that the sky is falling.
This seems decidedly anti-scientific. Announcing you have been proven right before getting full confirmation sounds suspicious. Plus, the host of anti-salmon farming quotes and language in the SFU press release (e.g. the repeated use of the cattle-farming term “feedlot,” which has negative connotations, instead of the neutral “salmon farm”) are surprising for a university-sanctioned press release.
Aren’t universities supposed to be neutral? Aren’t they supposed to be bastions of excellence and prudence?
Even if the two smolts, after further investigation, do indeed show they have ISA and that the samples are from B.C., it’s concerning that the science has taken a back seat to emotion, rhetoric and an obvious anti-aquaculture agenda. Because if they are confirmed, no one will bother to look for any other explanation but aquaculture.
They are making the facts fit the hypothesis.
In fact, science is so far in the back seat here it’s in the trunk. The press release mentions no actual facts other than that two smolts contained the virus. That’s it. The rest is speculation and fear-mongering. We are not exaggerating. Read the press release for yourself and try and spot the scientific facts. There is only one, as we explain above, and even that has not been confirmed as a fact yet.
What is going on here?
We all know why Ms. Alexandra Morton would say this. This is familiar territory for her, and she has been trying to link farms with the decline of wild salmon for more than a decade. Fair enough; but the science has not backed up her doomsday predictions.
Rick Routledge, SFU professor, is a statistician working on a long-term study of Rivers Inlet. He and his team are looking at long-term trends to see if they can find an explanation for the salmon return declines in the region. Why is he involved in this? That’s an interesting question we would like to see answered.
Once we hear if the ISA test results are actually true or not.
Meanwhile, we are aghast that SFU would publish something so flawed as factual, without waiting for science to bear it out.
