USMSFP's Lightner confirms Taura outbreak in Venezuela

USMSFP Technical Committee Member Don Lightner of the University of Arizona has confirmed the diagnoses of Taura Syndrome Virus (TSV) in Venezuela, where 26 outbreaks have been reported.

Originally detected in October 2004, the outbreak was not reported to the French International Office of Epizootics (OIE), which catalogs such outbreaks, until this week.

Lightner said that might be because they didn’t realize what they were dealing with initially. Clinical signs of the virus include red points in the telson, vacillating swimming and a soft carapace in animals that weigh less than 5 grams.

“There’s probably a tendancy in the industry to not really want to believe what’s going on,” Lightner said. “But once draining some affected ponds and starting over didn’t solve the problem, they started realizing they had a problem.”

Lightner works out of the University of Arizona ’s Aquaculture Pathology Laboratory and is one of the nation’s foremost experts on shrimp pathology. By genotyping this virus, Lightner found it has more mutations in its gene sequence than other TS samples collected from surrounding countries. He said the Venezuelan strain is not closely related to some of the more recent outbreaks isolated in the Americas nor Asia and that the only threat it poses is to other farming operations if it is exported in broodstock or post larvae.

Lightner said that there are plenty of genetic stocks of shrimp resistant to the virus available in the global marketplace and that Venezuela ’s shrimp farming industry “should not be down for long.”

According to Lightner, the global shrimp farming industry is certainly getting better and better at managing and avoiding viruses than it was several years ago.

“But, still, every now and then we get reminded they’re still there,” Lightner said.

The Wave