The SSHI, which is a collaboration between Canada's DFO, the Pacific Salmon Foundation and Genome British Columbia to better understand the distribution of microbes and diseases in wild and cultured salmon in B.C., used newly introduced and integrated diagnostic technologies to test for 45 salmon pathogens.
Other than the potential HSMI finding, the researchers did not find any reportable diseases such as Infectious Salmon Anemia (ISA), Infectious hematopoietic necrosis (IHN), Infectious pancreatic necrosis (IPN) and Salmon Alphavirus (SAV).
The BC Salmon Farmers Association, a SSHI partner, noted that the HSMI finding is important but that there is no consensus among the scientific community about the finding as the fish sampled in this farm showed no clinical signs of disease.
The single farm identified in 2013 as having fish with a potential diagnosis of HSMI had an overall healthy population of salmon, which showed normal behavior and growth rates, which are not consistent with HSMI.
In addition, government fish health experts identified liver and gill lesions in the same fish that are not typical of HSMI.
