HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK

Emerging diseases – Ready and waiting?

The Shine Dome, Canberra, 19 October 2004

Group D: Aquatic health

Rapporteur: Dr Belinda Wright

I work with the Commonwealth Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, in the aquatic animal biosecurity section.

We, Group D, were having a look at aquatic animals and the status of them with regard to emerging diseases in Australia. I think one of the key things that we came up with, or worked from the basic knowledge of, is that our background platform of understanding of a lot of the issues for aquatic animals is probably somewhat below what it is for the human health area and the terrestrial animal area. (Plants I am not so sure about.) So there was a difference of background there for us to work from.

Key issues
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Just to reiterate a little bit of this morning's sessions and scene-setting: some of the key issues that we had to deal with dealt with the fact that there is a huge range of species that we are looking at, not only in the fish world but with the other invertebrates – with the molluscs, the prawns, other crustaceans, and even so far as corals and other invertebrates are concerned. Also, amongst those, they exist in a wide range of environments, including some species which can exist in some quite different areas, whether in brackish water, fresh water or salt water, and in a wide range of temperatures. Each of these factors can influence the way that they react to the pathogens that they encounter.

Again on the lack of background knowledge: there is really so much that isn't known, even so far as the basic biology and the basic what's-normal for fish is concerned. One of the examples given was that we are actually starting to do blood testing and looking at what PCBs and white cell counts there are in animals, but we don't actually know what is normal, and what is normal under that range of different environmental conditions. It is very difficult then to judge what is abnormal and when you are actually starting to see what is a true pathological change.

Accompanying all of this is that, even though we have some excellent researchers in the country, there is still a serious lack of numbers of people who have the technical expertise to be actually participating in these areas – whether that is looking at vets, whether it is looking at scientists and the whole range of professionals who could contribute to aquatic animal health.

Accompanying this are the practical difficulties that you actually don't get to see fish or aquatic animals in their environment a lot of the time, and then even when you do they can often be very inaccessible. For example, if you get a report of a fish kill, you could actually be, as Brian Jones pointed out, quite some time away, so by the time you get there it limits what you can actually do to investigate the cause of that incident.

Coupled with that, I guess, as well is that even in some of the populations where they are a bit more accessible, we don't actually have a cost sharing agreement in place just for disease outbreaks in the aquatic area, and at times there may therefore not be the same incentive to report disease incidence as there may be in some of the other industries.

Coupled with this, there is a low perceived importance of aquatic animals as compared with the more traditional livestock industries. Despite their significant environmental importance, we still very often get, ‘Oh, you work with fish. Oh, okay, good.' So convincing people that they are important enough to actually fund the research and to fund the work can still be a very difficult task.

We did actually discuss the legislation and the effect that that can have. Apart from the different approaches that the different states and territories take as amongst themselves, and the difference between State and Territory legislation and the Commonwealth legislation, with aquatic animals there often exists the fact that a lot of the animal health legislation that is in place doesn't necessarily include fish and aquatic animals. One of the examples that was given, for one of the State offices to actually deal with an aquatic animal health outbreak, was to actually call for the ‘mustering' of the animals to get them into the appropriate area to deal with. So it is very difficult when you realise that even if you do have the technical expertise and even if we can actually get the person to the accessible area at that particular point in time, there may not legally be anything that you can actually do about it. And of course this does limit, somewhat, your response.

Translocation is another important issue for Aquatic health. There are a number of research projects under way at the moment actually looking at translocations and trying to develop some national policies. I think the guiding ones at present are on prawns and abalone, but they are trying to get some sort of harmonisation there and a national policy.

Matrix
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In the matrix that we came up with, we decided to split the areas into aquaculture and wild areas, because there can be quite a big difference in the way that the two areas are dealt with.

For surveillance, for aquaculture we decided that really there are fairly low to medium levels of surveillance at present. That largely reflects the differences between the different species and the different jurisdictions. Primarily the surveillance that is undertaken at present is passive or reactive, but once incidences are reported there is a reasonably good system for actually investigating them.

In some jurisdictions, for some species, there is actually some fairly good active surveillance. This is primarily driven by a desire to have access to export markets, and at the moment it is limited. I think Tasmania is one of the best examples of that right now.

In the wild area, there was no formal, routine surveillance of wild stock health status, although there is some ad hoc work that goes on, for example where individual researchers will screen prawn brood stock to check on their health status before they are actually sent in to hatcheries for commercial production.

Despite this lack of surveillance, there is a reasonable amount of networking and sharing of information, often informally, between the aquatic animal health professionals in Australia, for example through the National Aquatic Animal Health Technical Working Group and some of the other areas such as the ARC Parasitology Network. There is also, apparently, going to be a museums zoology database going up as well, which will help to give us some background knowledge there. While we felt that there wasn't always the formal surveillance in progress, the networks and the informal exchange of information were seen as invaluable.

On the prevention side, we rated it as low to medium. I think that again we need to differentiate a little bit here between some of the national policies that we have in place and perhaps some of what we can achieve in practical reality.

Low to medium varied a little bit again with the industry and with the jurisdiction involved. Some of the industries in the aquaculture area have developed codes of practice and these can include protocols for ensuring farm biosecurity. This explains the difference that we have in the rating there.

In the wild, basically we rated it as low, although we did note a difference in some areas. For example, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority is trying to get a project up and running whereby aquaculture farms in the area will have to have a disease management system in place, and that is one way that they can monitor the impacts or the potential spread of diseases to wild populations.

On the response front, in aquaculture: it is quite a broad range there, from low to high. Again this basically reflects the agent or the species that might be involved. There are a number of different species which are farmed in Australia, but they are very often quite regionalised in their distribution. So, for example, if we have an outbreak of a disease which might affect salmon, you might find that Tasmania will actually have quite a strong response but it might not happen anywhere else. Western Australia may not be interested, even if they see the same agent in some of their salmonid populations – because they don't have the same developed industry they may not be quite so keen to mount the full response to that.

In the wild: again we rated it that at present we have a fairly low level of response towards that. I think we could sit back and say for a minute there as well that historically our response to aquatic animal incidences has been somewhat slow and perhaps a little uncoordinated. I will put my Commonwealth officer hat on at the moment and say that there has, hopefully, been some change in that over the last few years, with the development of the AquaVet plan and some of the emergency response training programs which have been undertaken. But I guess we need to wait and see when we get the next incident how effective those have been in reality, and in practice how it all works out.

Our ability or our level of competence in recovery at the moment: again for aquaculture we rated that quite low. Largely I think that reflects partly the lack of a cost sharing agreement for aquatic animals right now.

In the wild it was considered to not be really applicable, because basically what we have done in the past is just to let it get on with it and deal with it itself – not a very proactive approach.

One of the participants did mention that there is some experimental work under way, looking at re?seeding of wild populations, for example with bleach resistant corals, and that Australia has been actually exporting that technology overseas as well.

Solutions/way forward
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Some of the things that we thought we could do to actually progress our development in these areas: the first was to raise the profile of aquatic animals (partly to attract funding) perhaps by emphasising not only the increased development of aquaculture but also the environmental importance of aquatic animals, both to the whole of the food chain and on a tourism perspective as well, particularly where the Reef is involved.

We thought that, to be able to progress a lot of our emerging disease responses and capabilities, harmonising legislation was going to be quite a key component.

I will skip over international linkages for the moment.

We thought we needed to increase our technical information. One of the key areas here that we found was that some of the more basic techniques, like taxonomy and histopathology, had perhaps been a little bypassed in recent years. Taxonomy, in particular, was one of the areas where we felt that we really needed to focus some effort. It is all very well finding something, but if you can't tell what it is, it is of very limited use.

Coupled with the increased technical information was an increase in training and having people not just to develop policies but actually on the ground and in the field to act.

Focusing on the use of multidisciplinary teams: I think particularly overall with this we couldn't emphasise enough the importance of the international linkages on several fronts. Given the limited resources that we do have available here, it was felt that it would be very useful to be able to tap into the knowledge and the expertise that already exists overseas. In many countries they have far more developed industries than we have; the particular example given was the salmonid industry, where there are a lot of multinational companies that actually have key developments in Europe and in South and North America. So a lot of the factors that we might have to deal with, they have already been dealing with for a number of years and have already solved, and we could learn a lot from their experiences.

Along with that were the international linkages. We felt that travelling overseas and actually looking at the work that they have done, and also participating in aid projects, could be a very useful way for us to share our experience and also to benefit from other people's.

We could also send people overseas as part of a training package, or have exchange programs in place, rather than trying to train people in Australia.

One of the key difficulties we found with the international linkages is that there seems to be a mind-set against people funding international travel to actually do the work, even though in a cost-benefit analysis it might be by far the most effective means of doing so.

Discussion

Jim Peacock – Aren't there any plants in the aquatic environment?

Belinda Wright – I suppose!

Jim Peacock – Caulerpa, or things like that? Some of them are problems too, I gather.

Belinda Wright – Yes, certainly they can be. We did focus on the animal side of it, I must say.

Brian Jones – One thing that was skipped over – and because I was chairing it, I let it go – was the comment I made about endocrine disrupters and the problems that the aquatic ecosystem is facing from all of the chemical stuff that everybody else is dumpling in the environment. It was interesting that the plant people mentioned their need for more sprays, when in fact something like 95 per cent of that spray ends up in the aquatic environment. A real and emerging problem is the use of endocrine disrupters or what is sometimes euphemistically referred to in the literature as ‘personal care products' or just, brutally, the Pill. Those hormones end up in the water supply and they are affecting the reproductive capacity of fish. Sooner or later society is going to have to grasp the bull by the horns and do something about it.

Jim Peacock – Yes, I think I heard a news item recently that in some areas of the United Kingdom there is so much antidepressant being recognised now in the water supply that the doctor just says, ‘Go and drink a glass of water.'

Tom Faunce – Just to follow up that question: is any attention being paid in Australia at the moment to actually tracing what happens to pharmaceutical by-products? Do we have surveillance systems in place to see what levels are getting into the water, and what we can do about it?

Belinda Wright – That's not something that I am aware of. There might be somebody else here who might have some information.

Jim Peacock – Can anyone offer any advice on that? Are we tracing pharmaceuticals?

Jawahar Patil – There is some work being done in the freshwater system where they are actually tracking xeno-oestrogens, if you like, which are endocrine disrupters.

James McCarthy – There is certainly quite a bit of work going on in poultry and meat, looking at antibiotics in human food because of the increasing concerns about the transmission of antibiotic resistant bacteria from the food we eat to us. So, for example, vancomycin resistant enterococcus, which is a major threat in our hospitals, has a strong link with the use of growth promoting antibiotics in animal production.

Wendy Loughlin – Just a comment about pesticides and the use of them in the plant industry: certainly I think the agricultural chemical industry is well behind the pharmaceutical and health industry. It has taken quite a turn in the last five or 10 years in terms of trying to modernise the type of chemicals they use, but still there is that lag. I guess I really wanted to make the comment that this is where I think the importance of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research is so important, because certainly I believe chemists would have a very strong role in (a) the structures of the compounds that go in to the agricultural industry and their biodegradability, but also (b) the ability to introduce filtration devices and, I guess, detection devices as well.

But as a chemist you have got to be aware of those problems and to be able to interact with people to even initiate a project that is going to allow those problems to be addressed and solved. So multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary.

Jim Peacock – That is a very good point. I think one of the reasons why transgenic cotton has been regarded well in Australia is that the cotton industry was using half the insecticides of total agriculture and the expectation is that, as from this season, there will be an 85 per cent reduction in the use of insecticides in that industry. That is a major point, and the peoples of, particularly, the regions where the cotton was growing were very much involved in the discussion around the whole entry of that new technology.

Catherine Waldby – I am just following on from this comment. Something that has emerged from all of the rapporteur sessions, I think, is that it is really important to develop forms of research funding that foster multidisciplinary research. I was in the Human Health section and we talked a lot about the fact that, particularly, the current division between the ARC and the NHMRC (including social science research, I should add) makes it difficult to navigate multidisciplinary research teams through the funding system. I have just returned from working in Europe, where program oriented research is much more common, where basically areas of research priority are set out and funding is organised in such a way that it sets out to deliberately create multidisciplinary teams – not to hope they happen but to organise them in a very structured way. I saw the great efficiency of that as a way to get good multidisciplinary research up and happening. So I just would want to emphasise the necessity for those structures to be rethought.

Jim Peacock – I think that is a very good point, not only about ARC and NHMRC but, for example, about the research and development corporations in agriculture. Programs that try and cross those different organisations often fall into the cracks and it is very difficult to get the funding through. We are not very good at that at all.

Belinda Wright – I think one of the other things that the EU does is that at least some of the funding will only be granted if you are actually consciously collaborating with institutes in other countries as well. They have actually got some of their funding set up that you won't get it unless you are actually working with other groups elsewhere.

Jim Peacock – I think we should really congratulate the rapporteurs for putting together – so quickly – such excellent summaries of their groups' discussions. So thank you very much.