Ich Infect Dich

Icky disease afflicting Alaskan salmon

Posted at 3:54 PM on 16 Jun 2008

Alaska's prized wild salmon are suffering from a disease that scientists suspect of being boosted by -- you guessed it -- global warming. The emergence of Ichthyophonus as a threat to king salmon has coincided with a steady warming of Yukon River water over the past few decades, which scientists say has welcomed cold-averse parasites northward. "Climate change isn't going to increase infectious diseases but change the disease landscape," says federal marine ecologist Kevin D. Lafferty. "And some of these surprises are not going to be pretty." Literally: Fish infected with "ich" become covered in white, pimply spots, smell funky, and produce mealy, oily flesh. One independent researcher estimates that perhaps 20 percent of king salmon are dying of ich before reaching spawning grounds. If so, fisheries would do well to cut back commercial catches by an equal amount to maintain a healthy population; so far, Alaska's Fish and Game Department has largely chosen to ignore the problem.

source: Los Angeles Times

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Comments: (11 comments)

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This is ridiculous

Every single change in the natural world is now being attributed to climate change. The world has changed a lot over 4 billion years. What the hell was the catalyst the previous 3,999,999,900 years???

Victory in Pattani

by MAD MAC at 9:39 PM on 17 Jun 2008

Slow vs. quick...

The world has changed a lot over 4 billion years.

Yes, but it generally changed very slowly. Even in the most catastrphic times in Earth past (short of orbital bombardments and supervolcanoes) the changes generally took centuries to have an effect that we are seein' in a few years time.

by Tasermons Partner at 10:52 PM on 17 Jun 2008

Not always

When Krakatoa went up, there were significant and immediate effects that lasted years.

the evidence indicates that climate change IS an issue and we need to deal with it. But man made causes are NOT, NOT the cause of every extreme weather event or every change we are seeing in the eco systems of the world and people should stop attributing everything to it. It's not intellectually honest.

Victory in Pattani

by MAD MAC at 11:13 AM on 18 Jun 2008
[ Parent ]

It's All Connected

What people like Mad Mac don't get is that climate change effects virtually everything. For example, if a parasite that can only exist above a certain temperature now exists in new places because of human-caused climate change, then humans are responsible. Just as there were with DDT, there will be effects from climate change that no one has even thought of yet.

You people should take a few ecology and biology courses or just do some reading on the subjects before you complain that those who've properly identified what's going on are not intellectually honest. Your attitude that humans are not causing immense ecological harm has no basis in reality.

by Wolverine at 4:48 PM on 18 Jun 2008

I said humans are not the only thing changing...

the ecology.

Let's talk about DDT for a minute. In Sri Lanka, at the height of DDT spraying, Malaria cases dropped to 19 for one year. NINTEEN. When the spraying was terminated, the numbers skyrocketed incredibly up into the 50,000 range. Ever had malaria Wolverine? It sucks. Take my word for it. It also killed MILLIONS of people a year. Of course, since you don't like people, you don't care when they die. So if mayb eight or nine hundred thousand children die annually from malaria, so much the better. They can't grow up to have a big carbon footprint right?

Like I said before. You have ZERO credibility.

Victory in Pattani

by MAD MAC at 11:12 PM on 18 Jun 2008
[ Parent ]

Tit-for-tat...

In Sri Lanka, at the height of DDT spraying, Malaria cases dropped to 19 for one year. NINTEEN.

Incidentally, the number of cancer, neural disorders, and stillborn rates skyrocketed.

Tit-for-tat.

by Tasermons Partner at 9:29 PM on 19 Jun 2008

The case against DDT isn't clear AT ALL.

"Incidentally, the number of cancer, neural disorders, and stillborn rates skyrocketed."

No, they didn't. Where did you get that from. Pull it out of your fourth point of contact? Prior to DDT in Sri Lanka there were an average of 55,000 cases of malaria annually. Do you know how many people that was killing? There is no question that in places where malaria or dengue are prevalent, mosquitoes have to be controlled or they will kill a LOT of people. I live in a dengue zone, and they have been using DDT derivatives here in limited quantities. So I did a little research into it. Turns out the half life in water (they primarily spray the breeding areas in the sewers) is 15 days. The link to cancer in humans is tenuous AND the tests always are given in gross quantities. It is much less clear whether small amounts of exposure are harmful at all.

Dengue and Malaria are killing hundreds of thousands of people every year, and immobilizing millions more.

Nature is trying to kill you all the time. Remember that.

Victory in Pattani

by MAD MAC at 10:00 PM on 19 Jun 2008
[ Parent ]

'Cancer rates skyrocketed'

Tasermons Partner wrote: [at the height of DDT spraying] the number of cancer, neural disorders, and stillborn rates skyrocketed.

Cite? Quantification? There is little association between DDT and cancer.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT

In 1987 the EPA classified DDT as a class B2 probable human carcinogen [...] Regarding the human carcinogenicity data, they stated "The existing epidemiological data are inadequate. Autopsy studies relating tissue levels of DDT to cancer incidence have yielded conflicting results."
A study of malaria workers who handled DDT occupationally found an elevated risk of cancers of the liver and biliary tract. Another study has found a correlation between DDE and liver cancer in white men, but not for women or black men. An association between DDT exposure and pancreatic cancer has been demonstrated in a few studies, but other studies have found no association. Several studies have looked for associations between DDT and multiple myeloma, and testicular, prostate, endometrial, and colorectal cancers, but none conclusively demonstrated any association.

Elevated cancer-risk typically takes many years to decades to express.

by Nucbuddy at 10:14 PM on 19 Jun 2008
[ Parent ]

I hope it's somewhere around 50 years...

because that's what we're talking about here. But this is typical environmentalist tripe. No reason to get twisted around the facts, we'll just throw in assumptions and present them as facts.

FACT: Malaria cases dropped from 50,000 in Sri Lanka to 19. There's a fact for you. We haven't even started talking about Dengue, which a good friend of mine contracted in Haiti and which totally sucked.

Victory in Pattani

by MAD MAC at 4:25 AM on 20 Jun 2008
[ Parent ]

Yes, all thanks to DDT...

...I don't suppose the fact that tens of thousands of mosquito nets were given away by the the Sri Lanka government through an aid program had anything to do with it all...

...'specially considerin' several studies that sugest that some mosquito populations have already built up an immunity to DDT?

by Tasermons Partner at 8:34 PM on 20 Jun 2008

I see, the nets must have deteriorated

at the same time the DDT spraying stopped. Because once it did, the numbers of malaria cases shot up into the tens of thousands again the next year.

Come on man, there is NO DENYING that spraying insecticides that kill mosquitos drops dengue and malaria cases dramatically. And right now there is VERY LITTLE evidence that would suggest that the benefits of that spraying is outweighed by the positives.

Where I live, the government sprays twice a year, and I'm glad they do.

Victory in Pattani

by MAD MAC at 8:48 PM on 20 Jun 2008
[ Parent ]

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