Loss of wild salmon disease doctor will have major impact

Times Colonist
July 16, 2013

A very important negative event occurred recently with the World Animal Health Organization pulling Dr. Fred Kibenge’s status as the only disease reference lab in the western hemisphere for testing fish diseases, particularly, ISA from farmed Atlantic salmon.

I asked the OIE several times for the origin of the complaint but received no response. While news releases have pointed to complaints from other countries, the other factor is that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, discredited in the Cohen Commission testimony in December 2011, has made representations to the OIE to pull Kibenge’s status. In testimony, they were cornered into admitting their interests are the export possibilities of the largely Norwegian-owned farms over natural wild salmon, a clear conflict of interest. Dr. Kim Klottins said the CFIA didn’t want to find ISA in B.C. The video is not pretty.

You will have recently read in the Times Colonist that they tested several thousand wild salmon – not farmed fish, the source of the Atlantic Ocean diseases, ISA and HSMI — and announced they found no ISA in B.C. That should be a good thing because the two diseases could well lead to the demise of all 11 Pacific salmonid species from California all the way to Korea. But it is not a good thing.

Drs. Miller (DFO, Nanaimo), Kibenge (P.E.I.) and Nylund (the only other OIE lab in the world, in Norway), have found ISA in B.C. wild salmon. During Cohen they discredited the DFO, CFIA and the B.C. testing systems. The CFIA and DFO use the Moncton lab under Dr. Gagne, and the experts found its procedures don’t find ISA and its equipment is poor; this means a negative response for the worst fish farm disease means nothing. These doctors have found literally tens of thousands of cases of ISA in B.C., dating all the way back to 1988.

Read the full article in the Times Colonist.

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Posted July 16th, 2013