Open letter to Dr. Gary Marty

Dr. Gary Marty. 

Photo UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine

Dr. Gary Marty

Fish Pathologist

Animal Health Centre

BC Ministry of Agriculture & Lands

Gary.Marty@gov.bc.ca

CC: the public

October 31, 2011

Dear Dr. Marty,

I am a member of the general public living in Vancouver. Over the past couple years I have become increasingly involved in the conservation of wild salmon. But who I am is not very relevant.

On August 31, 2011, while you were on the witness stand at the Cohen Commission, you made a rather stunning comment: “CFIA [the Canadian Food Inspection Agency] actually discourages us to test for international foreign animal diseases. They prefer that they be called.”

Let me provide some context.

You were being cross-examined by Mr. Spiegelman, counsel for Canada, and the topic was a report that Dr. Alexandra Morton wrote to CFIA inquiring about some possible cases of infectious salmon anemia (ISA) that she had found in the Commission's disclosure database.

Those suspected cases of ISA, it appears, turned out to be false alarms since CFIA responded to Dr. Morton’s query on May 16, 2011 by stating that “All cases were evaluated as NO RISK for ISA”.

But then, Mr. Spiegelman asked you some follow-up questions about how you – as a fish pathologist for the Province of B.C. – dealt with the risk of ISA, and what was your level of confidence that B.C. was protected from that disease.

And you stated:

“Throughout the audit program, we test between 600 and 800 fish every year, since 2003, with a highly sensitive and specific PCR test, and those have been all negative. And so that gives me a great deal of confidence that we don't have ISAV in British Columbia.

So in several of these cases, it's not routine, when you have that level of confidence, it's not routine to always test for it when it's not known to occur, especially when you always have this active audit program going on. In fact, CFIA actually discourages us to test for international foreign animal diseases. They prefer that they be called.

So the fish health, because there weren't requirements from CFIA before January, we sort of have a grandfather-type system.”

Your comments, I take it, were intended to convey the reassuring message that the risk of ISA in British Columbia was so low that CFIA considered systematic testing to be somewhat redundant and unnecessary.

What a difference six weeks can make! Today, obviously, your comments convey a very different message – that the regulatory agencies in charge of protecting us against animal disease pandemics were at sleep at the wheel, sloppy, complacent, dismissive, negligent, or worse.

I have four specific questions for you and would appreciate a detailed and prompt response on your part, given that time is of the essence in this matter.

1.       Does CFIA actually discourage veterinarians with the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture from conducting tests on foreign animal diseases such as ISA? Is a phone call really the preferred means of communication that this agency encourages, rather than rigorous and formal laboratory tests? How did/does that policy on the part of CFIA specifically impact your work as a veterinarian?

2.       When you said that “when you have that level of confidence, it's not routine to always test for [ISA] when it's not known to occur”, did you mean to say that you did not test potential cases of ISA systematically, or did you mean to say that you did perform those tests systematically in spite of CFIA encouraging you not to do that?

3.       I assume that your “level of confidence” has been significantly downgraded by recent developments and that you now consider the disease situation in B.C. to be anything but “routine”. (Unless you would want to take the position that the two separate ISA tests performed by the OIE laboratory in Prince Edward Island are both faulty – in which case I will definitely want to hear your comments about that as well.) How do you intend to change/upgrade your own protocols and procedures to respond to the unfolding ISA crisis, now that you are no longer in “high confidence” territory?

4.       Your comment “So the fish health, because there weren't requirements from CFIA before January, we sort of have a grandfather-type system” is unclear to me. I would appreciate if could elaborate on that.

Please provide any relevant documentation and/or explanations to support your answers.

In case you would want to dismiss my questions as being yet another overreaction from an uninformed member of the public, I would like to conclude by quoting from a letter by Dale Kelley, executive director of the Alaska Trollers Association, which was published in the Vancouver Sun this morning.

Her comments, I hope, will help convey to you the extreme level of urgency that the outside world places in this matter, as well as the potential dire consequences that inaction on the part of government – which you as a lead scientist represent – could involve:

“As the representative of Alaska fishermen who rely exclusively on the health of wild fish, I am appalled by the near-silence of the Canadian agencies responsible to protect them. I've reserved comment in hopes that they would send some signal to the public, and West Coast fishermen in particular, that Canada is proactively engaged with a "fish first" attitude.

On Friday Oct. 21 - more than a week after ISA was detected in B.C. salmon - Canadian officials issued a press release devoid of any sense of urgency. They announced they will run more tests, wait several weeks for results, and only then, if additional testing reveals ISA, stakeholders will be convened to, "identify and take appropriate next steps." Really?!”

Yours very truly,

Ivan Doumenc

ISA pandemic in BC

Alexandra Morton speaking at a press conference at SFU last week.

The New York Times reports on a second case of ISA - this time in coho salmon in the Fraser River system.

Brace, people. We have an ISA pandemic in BC.

In rivers, streams, and coastlines, people are collecting salmon samples and sending them for virus testing - because the government won't do it.

And every time we test, we will find more positives of that virus. And more. And more.

Until the structure collapses under the weight of its own incompetence and corruption. We will see the end of a mode of governance.

DFO as an institution is finished. Large transnational fish farm corporations will flee the country in shame, leaving ecosystems in ruin. And the Province of BC will lose whatever may be left of its legitimacy.

It's called the salmon revolution.

May the wild salmon survive this terrible, yet necessary, crisis.

---

Virus in Pacific Salmon Raises Worries About Industry

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

Published: October 28, 2011

Advocates for wild salmon said Friday that a deadly virus had been detected again in a Pacific salmon in British Columbia, but it was not clear if it would prove lethal to the fish population.

The finding, like one involving two juvenile wild sockeye salmon in British Columbia, poses questions for the viability of salmon fisheries in Canada and the United States. Scientists have expressed concern about the emergence of the virus while raising questions about complications, including scientific doubts about the quality of the tests.

In its active state, the virus, infectious salmon anemia, has devastated Atlantic salmon populations in fish farms in Chile and elsewhere. Salmon advocates have long worried that the virus could spread to wild populations, but it not clear whether Pacific salmon are equally susceptible.

In documents released Friday, an adult coho salmon supplied by salmon advocates to a prominent laboratory showed signs of carrying the disease. That fish was reported to have been found in a tributary of the Fraser River, a critical salmon run for fishermen in Canada and the United States.

Last week, researchers from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and elsewhere said that they had discovered the virus in 2 of 48 juvenile fish collected as part of a study of sockeye salmon in Rivers Inlet, on the central coast of British Columbia. The study was undertaken after scientists observed a decline in the number of young sockeye.

Such a virus could have a deep impact on the survival of salmon in the Pacific Northwest. Some scientists have suggested that the virus had spread from British Columbia’s aquaculture industry, which has imported millions of Atlantic salmon eggs over the last 25 years.

Salmon farms and wild fish are separated only by a net, many have noted. No treatment exists for the virus, which does not spread to humans, scientists say.

The crowded conditions of salmon farms are thought to abet the spread of the virus.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/science/pacific-salmon-virus-raises-worries-about-industry.html

Ghost river

Nicole Mackay weighing a salmon at the Adams River before sampling it. 

Photo Sonja Grosse Broemer.

“STRONG SALMON NUMBERS DEFY PREDICTIONS IN ADAMS RIVER RUN” -- Such was the upbeat headline appearing in several newspapers around British Columbia in early October.

According to those reports, the DFO estimates for the 2011 Adams run had been bumped from 58,000 to almost half a million returning sockeye. “A tenfold increase”, papers and broadcasters announced triumphantly. The sockeye, they concluded, were returning “in stronger numbers for the second year in a row”. Our salmon are back! was the general mood and feel-good story of the day.

So much so, that DFO Community Liaison Officer Jeremy Heighton felt he had to step in to rain a little on the media parade. “The tone and numbers used in this story can be quite misleading without correct context. I want to clarify what is actually going on”, he wrote in an email. “At this time… the number of fish passed through Mission (400,000+) is fairly consistent with historic sub-dominant run numbers. We are NOT seeing 10x the number of fish projected. We are simply seeing the passage of fish which are heading to the Adams.”

Mr. Heighton was spelling out the obvious: just because we have seen them in Mission does not mean that all the sockeye will make it to the Adams, many may actually die en-route.

And he did well to moderate our enthusiasm, because this moment of media bliss did not last for long. A few days later, as I was preparing to drive up to the Adams with a group of salmon friends, I started to receive some alarming reports from people already at the river telling me that it was, for the most part, empty. We left for the Adams weary of what we would find.

As soon as we arrived, we knew something was off balance. We were supposedly at the peak of the run, October 23, and yet there was hardly any smell of rotting fish in the air. At the first bridge out of the parking lot, before reaching the river itself, we looked down into the small channel where last year (the legendary 2010) hundreds of fish had competed and died for the right to spawn. This time however, not a single fish, either dead or alive.

We went to the river bank. No fish. We walked along the trail through the woods for several minutes, checking out every opening in the vegetation leading to the river. No fish. We finally reached the gravel beach at the end of the Island Loop trail. There were some fish there. Finally, some sockeye. Not a lot, though. I spotted maybe sixty in the water ahead of me, comfortably spaced every two to three meters, where one year earlier thousands upon thousands were densely congregated in massive schools.

At the Roderick Haig-Brown plaque:
the most densely populated section of the river.

Photo Sonja Grosse Broemer

More troubling, I noticed even fewer dead fish on the river bank than in the water itself. If there are no carcasses, I thought in a flash of panic, this means that the fish never made it here. So we changed our plan and decided to walk straight down to the other end of the park where the mouth of the river was, and where drifting fish carcasses would normally accumulate. At the river mouth, we would surely know.

We got to the river mouth and strolled along the shoreline of Shuswap Lake. There were almost no carcasses, only a few scattered bones and fish heads looking pretty ancient. It was like inspecting the vestiges of a battle fought many months ago. Had we missed it? Was the run over? But I clearly remembered hearing the opposite message about the sockeye taking their time this year and the peak date being constantly pushed back. So no, we couldn’t have missed it.

We gradually got better at spotting dead carcasses under logjams and vegetation, and so we did find a few here and there. A hundred dead fish, two hundred maybe in the delta section around us. Then we saw five living sockeye in the water, all females for whatever reason, who were slowly making their way up the river. They looked as lost as we were in this solitude.

You may not fully understand what was going through our heads if you haven’t yourself seen the 2010 Adams run. We were standing at the very place where, one year earlier, piles upon piles of dead fish had accumulated over hundreds of meters of shoreline as DFO staff went by counting them. Then, the beachfront must have held tens of thousands of dead fish. Obviously, we didn’t expect anything close to that number this year, but we did expect at least to see some dead fish. Instead, we were standing on the banks of a ghost river.

The Adams River mouth in 2010...
Photo Isabelle Groc

... and that same place today.
Photo Sonja Grosse Broemer

The river mouth today from another angle. Photo Elodie Cousin

“What do you think?” I asked fellow salmon activist Nicole Mackay who was part of our trip.

“It’s bleak”, she said looking straight ahead. And then she said nothing at all, and then neither did I.

Nicole had brought equipment with her to take some fish samples. It's a routine which salmon people such as Nicole have got into: whenever you travel to salmon country, you come prepared to take samples. Because DFO won’t do it. And so, it’s up to the people to gather those samples which are so critical in establishing the truth about diseases decimating our salmon.

Focusing on fish samples was a welcome distraction for our group, as it kept our minds away from dark thoughts. So we all went back to the gravel beach of the Island Loop trail, the only area where we had spotted fresh carcasses suitable for sampling. Nicole picked up a male, weighed it, had a quick look at its gills. They were healthy. She cut off the head and carved through its forehead with a sharp knife until she could access the brain. With a pair of tweezers she delicately grasped the small brain and dropped it into a sampling tube and sealed it. Then she opened the fish’s belly: squirts of milt gushed from under her knife. That fish had not spawned. Nicole inspected the liver and kidney and spleen and took a sample of each, taking detailed notes along the way. Then she put the fish back together and replaced it in the water where she had found it. She performed the same operation on a female. As she cut its belly open, eggs came out bursting. No spawn there either. In all, Nicole opened five fish that afternoon, two of which had spawned.

Unspawned. Photo Sonja Grosse Broemer

Next we walked upstream to an area around the plaque dedicated to Roderick Haig-Brown, the park’s founder. Curiously, that’s where most of the sockeye were located. I counted approximately fifty to sixty fish per 100 x 100 meter square of river. That was definitely better than downstream, although still pretty godawful. Forget 2010. I focused my memories on 2007, the year which had spawned the current run and which, according to DFO, had seen about 50,000 fish return.

In 2007, I had come to the Adams with my parents who were visiting from France, a country where wild salmon has been extinct for half a century. I remember the stark contrast between them, standing like two children in complete awe, unaware until that day that nature could offer such a sublime spectacle – and me, heartbroken and dejected as I contemplated a largely empty river, asking myself for the first time what the hell was happening to our salmon. Yet I have no doubt that in 2007, in spite of my depressing memories, there were significantly more salmon in the water and on the shores than in 2011. We won’t have DFO’s final numbers on this year’s run until late December, but I will wage that it will not amount to much more than 40,000 – if we are lucky.

The media headlines were wrong. There will be no miracle run this year. We are back to the bleak reality of steep salmon decline. One thing I cannot get out of my mind, though, is this number: 400,000 sockeye confirmed in Mission back in September, according to the Pacific Salmon Commission. Those are escapement numbers, meaning that those fish do not get harvested but are let through so they can reach the spawning grounds. And yet, at the other end, in the Adams River, maybe forty thousand if all goes well. That would be, if confirmed, a 90 percent en-route mortality rate.

I don’t care what scientists and fishery managers may say about high mortality affecting late runs such as the Adams, or the fact that such death rates have become the new norm in recent years. Those numbers are unnatural. Especially when I ponder that historically, sub-dominant runs (of which 2007 or 2011 are a part) have seen one million sockeye return on average.

Our sockeye are dying. Are they being killed by a virus? We don’t know yet. But we will, thanks to the army of anonymous heroes who, like Nicole Mackay, are collecting fish samples all over the Fraser. This is a novel form of direct action which is legal, appealing, useful, and politically devastating for the structure's status quo. It is threatening DFO and other government bodies of irrelevance in one of their core missions, disease detection.

With the assistance of SFU Professor Rick Routledge, Alexandra Morton uncovered the deadly ISA virus in pacific salmon on her first attempt, even though government has been claiming for years that their own tests for that same virus have all come back negative. On her first attempt: what does it tell us about their tests? More than a successful test, this marks the emergence of a successful movement. I was proud and privileged to witness that movement in action on the shores of the Adams River last weekend, as Nicole Mackay methodically and silently collected her fish samples.

Vancouver Sun: Facts on salmon tests

Facts on salmon tests and egg imports raise concerns

BY IVAN DOUMENC, VANCOUVER SUN OCTOBER 27, 2011

Re: Let's not jump to conclusions over infected salmon, Letters, Oct. 22.

Mary-Ellen Walling writes: "Nearly 5,000 fish from salmon farms in B.C. have been tested for ISA with the highly sensitive PCR test and the disease has never been found."

But she does not write that Dr. Gary Marty, lead veterinarian for the government of B.C., has diagnosed the classical lesions associated with ISA over a thousand times in B.C.'s fish farms since 2006. There is therefore a strong suspicion that the ISA virus has been in our waters for at least five years but that government scientists have failed to recognize it as such.

She writes: "Egg imports have been highly regulated for many years."

But she omits to write that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has punched some gaping holes through those regulations over the years to allow unregulated hatchery eggs to enter B.C. at the request of the fish farm industry.

It was revealed at the Cohen Commission - and entered there as evidence - that in 2004, DFO director for the Pacific Region Dr. Laura Richards successfully petitioned to allow for the importation of eggs from a European hatchery that did not meet Canada's fish health protection regulations. She did that on behalf of two B.C. salmon farming companies.

Finally, Ms. Walling writes that "experts across Canada are cautioning people" not to overreact and oversimplify.

For their part, experts and lawmakers across the U.S. and the world are voicing concern about this ISA discovery and wondering why Canadian authorities did not apply the precautionary principle while they still could.

Ivan Doumenc Vancouver

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

http://www.vancouversun.com/Facts+salmon+tests+imports+raise+concerns/5614399/story.html#ixzz1bzye7tKZ

Manufactured disaster

The ISA virus. Photo: Fisheries Research Service

Sadly, we had it coming. It is now official. The European strain of Infectious Salmon Anemia (ISA) has been reported today for the first time in Pacific wild salmon. It was found in sockeye caught on the central coast of British Columbia. Read the press release from Salmon Are Sacred, and the stories all over the media.

ISA is a deadly virus directly linked to fish farms. It has decimated salmon stocks in many countries since the 1980s such as Norway, Scotland, Chile. Entire ecosystems and coastal communities have been ecologically and economically devastated by this salmon equivalent of the Black Death. And now we learn we have it too.

With such a dangerous virus out in the open around the world for so many years, the question on everyone’s minds this morning was: how did we get to this? How did we allow this virus to even reach the shores of British Columbia? Surely by now, we know how to stop this thing, don’t we?

We actually do, and we have known for many years. Ban the import of Atlantic salmon hatchery eggs. In this age of total globalization, even farmed salmon eggs are no longer produced locally but rather thousands of miles away, usually in Europe. Those imported eggs are important, because scientists see them as the primary vector in the transmission of viruses such as ISA from one region of the world to the other.

Since the late 1980s, scientists in Canada and elsewhere have relentlessly alerted government against the risks of such egg imports. But Canada’s Department of Fish Farms chose instead to ignore those calls and adopted a policy of institutional recklessness to fulfill its mandate of serving industrial aquaculture. A report written by Dr. Alexandra Morton for the Cohen Commission before ISA was discovered in BC, and which was recently admitted as evidence in spite of furious objections on the part of government and industry lawyers, explains in detail how government has gambled with our wild salmon.

BC’s eggs, Morton explains, are shipped from a hatchery in Iceland called Stofnfiskur. The problem is that this particular hatchery does not meet the health safety standards of Canadian law. So technically, they couldn’t be imported. Don’t let that technicality stop the Department of Fish Farms, though! In a briefing dated 2004, DFF’s Director for the Pacific Region Laura Richards articulated the following key arguments in an effort to allow those eggs into Canada in spite of their non-compliance:

• “Two BC salmon farming companies wish to import Atlantic salmon eggs from Stofnfiskur, an Icelandic company which is not certified under the Canadian Fish Health Protection Regulations”
• “Failure to provide permission for egg importation may trigger a trade challenge under the World Trade Organization …” 
• “Additionally, DFO could also be viewed as causing a competitive disadvantage of the aquaculture industry by denying them access to alternate strains”

Following this briefing, Alexandra Morton wrote to Justice Cohen in her report, “Laura Richards was successful in her petition to allow eggs from a hatchery that does not meet Canada’s Fish Health Protection Regulations.” By opening that regulatory backdoor for the industry, Dr. Richards may have allowed the ISA virus to enter British Columbia.

In that same report, Dr. Morton also showed that the ISA virus may have been present in BC for several years but that scientists on government payroll have chosen not to acknowledge that possibility. Dr Gary Marty, a lead veterinarian with the Province of BC, reported cases of classic lesions associated with ISA 1,100 times since 2006. Yet he never registered any of those repeated diagnoses – not a single time – as being the ISA virus itself, even though the disease was very well known worldwide and was routinely associated with fish farm operations similar to those found in British Columbia, and even though the symptoms matched the disease perfectly.

The problem in this matter is not so much Dr. Marty’s personal decision not to recognize those thousand diagnoses as being ISA. Rather, as Alex Morton noted in her report to Cohen, the problem is that “Dr. Marty is the only government person we know of who is doing these examinations.” Placed by his employer, the government of BC, in a position of complete monopoly over the diagnosis of ISA, Dr. Marty can literally say whatever takes his fancy about those symptoms. For that matter, he could have said that those fish died of old age. No other scientist is in a position to either confirm or challenge his conclusions, not having access to the same information as he does. And so, Marty’s statement that those classic symptoms of ISA are not actually ISA can never be scientifically disproved. It is, as Morton wrote to Cohen, a statement that “could be repeated indefinitely”.

And this is how a government maintains the status quo, preserves a position of business as usual no matter what may be happening in the real world. By manufacturing self-supporting scientific statements which cannot be challenged, the charade can be, in effect, maintained and repeated indefinitely. Of course, this is no longer called science, but dogma. And yes, it may occasionally find itself contradicted by real things that happen in the real world – such as herrings bleeding from their fins, Harrison sockeye dying by the hundreds of thousands without spawning, or the emergence of freakish bright-yellow pink salmon all over the Fraser River. But those are merely PR matters that need to be managed, a small price to pay for the perpetuation of the cozy relationship between government, industry, and the scientific establishment within the salmon-industrial complex.

How does the public fight back? As so many times before, Alexandra Morton is showing the way, and it’s actually simpler than it sounds. She is breaking the monopoly of knowledge that government is working so hard to maintain. She has taken the matter of salmon testing and diagnosis in her own hands. Earlier this month, she went in the field twice to test the salmon – and came back with evidence of severe hepatitis and pre-spawn mortality in the Fraser salmon. She struck a partnership with SFU professor Rick Routledge to send central coast sockeye for testing – and came back with the ISA virus. She has fearlessly denounced the ruthless policy of financial starvation and bureaucratic harassment inflicted by the Department of Fish Farms on one of her most talented scientists, Dr. Kristi Miller – and I will wage my money that Alex will succeed there too in breaking the knowledge impasse. Miller will eventually get her money and her research will resume and provide us with righteous answers.

Fighting back will require an array of initiatives. In this asymmetrical struggle against a bloated and hyper-powerful bureaucracy, our strategy is to initiate shocks which grow over time by taking a life of their own. One such initiative is called the “Kristi Miller Fund”. Back in September, Dr. Miller testified at the Cohen Commission that her research funding for the sockeye salmon had been cut off. In particular, she had applied for a grant to test farmed salmon for the virus signature that she had identified. She was asking for $18,750 – a pittance in research terms – but her hierarchy said sorry, we don’t have the money at this time.

The Kristi Miller Fund

What a slap in the face. We who were sitting in the public gallery at the Cohen Commission on that day were fuming with rage. Then someone said: “So they don’t have that money, eh? Heck! (actually she used another word) Let’s just raise the money ourselves so Kristi Miller can do her testing.” The Kristi Miller Fund was born. To date, about $6,000 of the money has been raised. That’s about a third, not bad. I suspect we will get way beyond the required $18,000 without even breaking a sweat, as soon as this particular initiative will have taken a life of its own and grown beyond control. People have given anywhere between $10 and $1,000. What matters really is not how much each person gives but rather how many people end up contributing to this Fund, that’s the metric I’ll be most interested in.

The purpose of this initiative is not to bail out government with our own paycheques. Rather, it’s to turn this petty, shameful move to starve Miller’s work into a media and PR nightmare for the government. Initiate a shock that will grow on its own and blow up in the bureaucracy’s face. When we have the money, we’ll hold a press conference and put up a big stink about it, hand out to the media a story that they will want to tell. The plan is to force Miller’s hierarchy to miraculously “find” the money that she was denied. It’s really about saving government from its own stupidity, helping the Department of Fish Farms to start its long, painful march towards detox. So than one day, it can break away from its incestuous relationship with industry and be – once again! – the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

People have asked: what happens if the Department of Fish Farms refuses to take the money or if it suddenly finds money of its own to fund Miller? Where does the money go? Well, I think that answer is rather obvious. We will hand it over to Alexandra Morton, so she can do more testing and diagnosis independently of industry and government. That way, we will win on both counts. Miller will get her funding restored, and Morton will continue her heroic work to break the state monopoly over salmon knowledge.

Follow this link to pitch in your own two cents to the Kristi Miller Fund!

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