TY - JOUR
T1 - Salmon aquaculture, Piscirickettsia salmonis virulence, and one health
T2 - Dealing with harmful synergies between heavy antimicrobial use and piscine and human health comment on Cabello and Godfrey (2019)
AU - Avendaño-Herrera, Ruben
N1 - Funding Information:
Therefore, the question arises, where is P. salmonis the rest of the year? The aquatic environment of southern Chile would appear not to be a good alternative. Experiments have shown that P. salmonis can survive 14 days in saltwater but is almost immediately inactivated in freshwater ( Lannan and Fryer, 1994 ). A field study further demonstrated longevity in seawater by detecting P. salmonis DNA in proximity to commercial aquaculture operations for 40 days after a disease outbreak ( Olivares and Marshall, 2010 ). Furthermore, P. salmonis can adhere to living surfaces and form biofilms on abiotic substrates ( Larenas et al., 2003 ; Marshall et al., 2012 ), expressing the cheA chemotaxis gene to induce biofilm production ( Albornoz et al., 2017 ). Despite this knowledge, questions remain. To this end, the Aquaculture Health Management Program (PGSA), a public-private initiative executed by SERNAPESCA and financed by the Ministry of Economy and Association of Chilean Salmon Producers (SalmonChile), has investigated some of the 52 priority research questions resulting from the 2018 expert workshop held in Puerto Montt, Chile ( Mardones et al., 2018 ). Question 19 in particular asks, “How does P. salmonis interact with surfaces and survive outside of hosts?” Our research group has demonstrated the ability of P. salmonis to form viable, mucus-tolerant biofilms on plastic surfaces in seawater. This ability represents a potentially important environmental risk for the persistence and dissemination of piscirickettsiosis ( Levipan et al., 2020 ). Furthermore, P. salmonis survives inside the protozoan Acanthamoeba castellanii, constituting a possible mechanism of persistence in culture water (Gómez et al. 2019).
Funding Information:
The authors declare that they have no competing financial interests. The research was carried out with financial support by FONDAP 15110027 grant awarded by the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID, Chile).
Funding Information:
The author appreciates the support of the FONDAP 15110027 grant awarded by the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID, Chile). I would like to thank the five peer reviewers for their constructive comments, which guided me in improving the content of this text and in enriching the analysis and debate of the topics presented in this Letter to the Editor.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier B.V.
Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2021/2/15
Y1 - 2021/2/15
N2 - Cabello and Godfrey (2019) recently published the review “Salmon aquaculture, Piscirickettsia salmonis virulence, and One Health: Dealing with harmful synergies between heavy antimicrobial use and piscine and human health,” in Aquaculture. Several gaps in the review hinder readers from understanding the complexity of P. salmonis and the bacterium-host interaction. This is in addition to omitting essential information that, in my opinion, should be reported because erroneous policy, economic, and social decisions could be made and could notably impact the Chilean aquaculture industry. For example, P. salmonis is not an opportunistic pathogen with poor virulence/pathogenicity, and the literature instead widely supports several pathogenic mechanisms (e.g., iron uptake) and virulence capacity in vitro and in vivo. Furthermore, P. salmonis is not an emerging pathogen – P. salmonis was described 31 years ago, is currently the primary cause for salmonid mortalities in Chile, and is even officially monitored as a national health threat. Yet other examples reveal gross bias, such as indicating that quinolones are a current treatment for P. salmonis. In reality, the use of quinolones have drastically decreased since 2015 according to official government reports (<1% total volume depending on the year), and prior use is not only against piscirickettsiosis but also the bacterium responsible for bacterial kidney disease. The scope of this commentary addresses all of these issues in Cabello and Godfrey's (2019) review.
AB - Cabello and Godfrey (2019) recently published the review “Salmon aquaculture, Piscirickettsia salmonis virulence, and One Health: Dealing with harmful synergies between heavy antimicrobial use and piscine and human health,” in Aquaculture. Several gaps in the review hinder readers from understanding the complexity of P. salmonis and the bacterium-host interaction. This is in addition to omitting essential information that, in my opinion, should be reported because erroneous policy, economic, and social decisions could be made and could notably impact the Chilean aquaculture industry. For example, P. salmonis is not an opportunistic pathogen with poor virulence/pathogenicity, and the literature instead widely supports several pathogenic mechanisms (e.g., iron uptake) and virulence capacity in vitro and in vivo. Furthermore, P. salmonis is not an emerging pathogen – P. salmonis was described 31 years ago, is currently the primary cause for salmonid mortalities in Chile, and is even officially monitored as a national health threat. Yet other examples reveal gross bias, such as indicating that quinolones are a current treatment for P. salmonis. In reality, the use of quinolones have drastically decreased since 2015 according to official government reports (<1% total volume depending on the year), and prior use is not only against piscirickettsiosis but also the bacterium responsible for bacterial kidney disease. The scope of this commentary addresses all of these issues in Cabello and Godfrey's (2019) review.
KW - Chilean salmon
KW - Fish pathogen
KW - Piscirickettsiosis
KW - Virulence
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85093928596&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.aquaculture.2020.736062
DO - 10.1016/j.aquaculture.2020.736062
M3 - Letter
AN - SCOPUS:85093928596
VL - 532
JO - Aquaculture
JF - Aquaculture
SN - 0044-8486
M1 - 736062
ER -