Norway Royal Salmon has confirmed the presence of infectious salmon anemia (ISA) at one of its farm sites and said it suspects the disease may be present at two additional sites.
The company said in a media release that it discovered the presence of ISA at its Store Kvalfjord site in Finnmark, Norway. The farm contains 430,000 fish with an average weight of 2.2 kilograms.
NRS added that ISA may also be present at its Pollen, Norway operation and at the Lille Kvalfjord site in Finnmark, which is adjacent to the Store Kvalfjord farm. There are 1.4 million fish in the three areas, with an average weight of about 3 kilograms. The company “has begun extraction of fish from operating area,” Reuters reported.
“NRS continues to work to identify the extent of the infection and will come back to the consequences in an updated stock exchange notice,” the company said in a statement.
The company is waiting on results of ISA tests at the two additional sites. The outbreak is bad news for NRS, which announced its second highest operating earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) for its third quarter in early November. NRS’s EBIT reached NOK 192 million (USD 23 million, EUR 20 million), equaling an EBIT of NOK 19.29 (USD 2.35, EUR 2.00) per kilogram.
“Consequences of a possible disease detection are still difficult to estimate,” the company said in the Reuters report.
