The Neighborhood Toxicologist: Fishing for disease

Monday, December 17, 2007

Fishing for disease

Just a brief note as I prepare a longer (and more depressing article) on farmed fish - salmon in particular. Hearing how local wild caught Connecticut River brood stock salmon, and their offspring, had to be killed off this month after Infectious Pancreatic Necrosis (IPN) virus was detected in a few returning fish, I decided to take a closer look at the relationship between farmed fish and disease in wild fish.

It’s not a pretty picture, and although the link between IPN in our few and very precious local salmon is unclear, there’s plenty of evidence indicating that fish farming has increased disease in wild fish populations. Additionally there are a multitude of other problems that require attention – before farmed fish in a safe (and by this, I mean environmentally sound) manner.

For a quick read on the topic check out “Farming the deep blue sea,” an article about moving fish farming from near shore or coastal areas to offshore, published last spring in Environmental Science and Technology or more recently, Parasites from fish farms driving wild salmon to extinction in the news section of the journal Science.

So - enjoy your salmon in ignorant bliss over the holidays while you can. I'll be posting more on this, particularly the impacts of coastal and near-shore salmon farming in excruciating disease ridden detail later, after the new year.

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Some history: Toxicology as a formally recognized scientific discipline is relatively new (mid 1900’s) although the science itself is thousands of years old. Consider the potential results of early trial and error experiences of hunter-gatherers for whom identifying a toxic plant or animal was a life or death situation. Some of the most poisonous substances known today are naturally produced chemicals including Ricin from castor beans or tetrodotoxin from the puffer fish. Early humans’ careful observation of plants or animals with toxic characteristics such as frogs containing curare, were put to use not only for avoidance of toxic substances but for weapons as well. Additionally, many naturally derived poisons were likely used for hunting, medicinals (the Egyptians were aware of many toxic substances such as lead, opium and hemlock as early as 1500 BCE), and eventually for the political poisonings practiced, for example, by the early Greeks and Romans.

As humans sought to better understand natural compounds that were both beneficial and harmful, there was very little if any clear understanding of the fundamental chemical nature of substances. That is, there was no connection between the ‘extract’ or ‘essence’ of a poisonous plant or animal and any one particular chemical that might cause toxicity. In fact, an awareness of chemistry in its modern form did not occur until the mid to late 1600’s[i]. So it is ironic that Paracelsus, a physician from the sixteenth century and one of the early “Fathers of Toxicology” had no clear understanding of chemistry as we know it today. He along with many others at that time apparently believed that all matter was composed of three “primary bodies” (sulfur, salt, and mercury)[ii]. Yet Paracelsus also coined the now famous (or infamous) maxim of the newly emerging discipline of toxicology:

“All substances are poisons, there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison from a remedy.” (Paracelsus,1493-1541)

This phrase and Paracelsus’ name are committed to memory by hundreds of new toxicology students each year and has become the ‘motto’ of toxicology. Interestingly, if one takes Paracelsus at face value, it appears he was referring to potential remedies. This is an important point, since in recent years some have turned this around to suggest that exposure to very small doses of highly toxic chemicals (such as dioxins) might not be an problem! These days most of us are well aware of the fact that overdosing can turn remedies to poisons, even with apparently innocuous drugs such as aspirin and Tylenol.

[i] Ball, P. 1999. Life’s Matrix: A Biography of Water. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, NY.

[ii] Ball, 2001.