Bhubaneswar: New kits to diagnose fish diseases

BHUBANESWAR: Aquaculture farmers across the country can now diagnose bacterial diseases in freshwater fish. The Central Institute of Freshwater Aquaculture (CIFA) has come out with two new fish disease diagnosis kits for detection of major bacterial diseases in freshwater fish. The Spot Agglutination and Dot Elisa kits developed by the national research institute under Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) can be suitably used in field condition by fish farmers to diagnose the diseases and assess the health status of cultured fishes on a regular basis.

Aquaculture faces at least 25 per cent loss due to diseases, of which more than 50 per cent is caused by the bacterial pathogens. The major bacterial diseases include ulcers, red diseases, septicaemia and gill diseases caused mostly by aeromoniasis, edwardsellosis, columnaris, vibriosis, pseudomonas  and flavobacterium sp. While one of the major bacterial disease aeromoniasis, commonly known as red disease is encountered throughout the season, especially culture duration of carp farming, other bacterial diseases like edwardsellosis and bacterial gill are mainly noticed during winter and columnaris and vibriosis infects the fishes mostly during summer and rainy season. 

A senior scientist at CIFA Priyabrata Swain said bacterial fish diseases are very common and considered as difficult health problems to deal with since those mostly manifest as ulcers, red diseases, septicaemia, fin rot and tail rot, dropsy and gill diseases.“Fishes are susceptible to several bacterial infections, mainly when reared in high density conditions. Disease outbreaks elevate the mortality rate and decrease the productivity efficiency, causing high economic loss of the fish farmers,” he said.

As vertical expansion of fish culture with diversified species and higher stocking density has resulted more frequent occurrence of bacterial, parasitic and viral pathogens, leading to higher morbidity or mass mortalities and hampering production, farmers were longing for technological interventions and application of suitable diagnostic and control measures to combat disease occurrence in fish.

These diagnostic kits were released by the Parliamentary Standing  Committee on Agriculture at ICAR-CIFA here recently and transferred to a Chitchatting-based entrepreneur Agrawal Trading Co for commercial production and marketing in the country. “Use of the kits will help farmers to detect the disease early and control it in time. Once detected, the diseases can be cured and farmers saved from loss of production. The Spot agglutination kit costs `12 and Dot Elisa around `42 each,” Swain added.