Following three years of exhaustive efforts, an international team of researchers announced in April they’d found the cause of a disease that, since 2009, has killed billions of shrimp raised on farms in Southeast Asia.
Yet while the news was welcome, Donald Lightner, Ph.D., widely credited with finding the cause of the outbreak, says only half the problem is solved. As of June, no means of stopping the spread of the disease, commonly called “early mortality syndrome,” or simply EMS, had been discovered, implying supplies of tiger and Pacific white shrimp shipped from Southeast Asia will remain tight for the remainder of 2013. That leaves shrimp buyers searching the globe for replacement product.
“It was nice to have it figured out, but as to what the agent is and its cause, there’s work left to do,” said Lightner, a professor in veterinary science and microbiology at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
The disease, known as “acute hepatopancreatic necrosis syndrome” (AHPNS), kills juvenile shrimp by destroying their hepatopancreas (an organ crucial to digestion) in as little as one month after transference to ponds. The disease first appeared in China in 2009 and has since migrated south to Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia, costing producers billions of dollars in losses.
Click here to read the full story that ran in the June issue of SeaFood Business >
