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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 sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½ The video is not pretty.

You will have recently read in the sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½ 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 sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½ 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 sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½ wild salmon. During Cohen they discredited the DFO, CFIA and the sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½ 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 sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½, dating all the way back to 1988.

For instance, Miller’s work showed 25 per cent of Clayoquot Sound farmed Chinook had ISA and HSMI. This means 125,000 to 250,000 fish per farm. There are 22 farms in the Sound and wild Chinook numbers are at extinction levels — only 501 fish in six rivers. The Kennedy Lake sockeye run, once the largest on Van Isle, is no more.

The CFIA is a member on the OIE council which has members from many nations. Kibenge was the lab that found Atlantic ISA (Nylund showed it was taken from Norway), in Chile. In 2008, ISA wiped out quarter of a billion farmed salmon, a loss of $2 billion, with 13,000 losing jobs. The CFIA with its $740-million budget apparently wants to control the narrative with respect to farmed salmon diseases in sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½, and so Kibenge lost his status as the place where wild sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½ salmon have been sent most frequently for testing by concerned sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½ residents.

I read a scientific study not long ago that says fish farms cause a loss of 50 per cent of the wild salmon/trout where they are introduced, and this includes sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½ There are, for instance, only 6,000 wild Chinook spawners on the entire west coast of Vancouver Island. Fewer wild salmon translates into fewer jobs in sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½