On Friday Justice Cohen created a new classification of exhibit – Not Public.
The Provincial Animal Health Centre vet, Dr. Gary Marty examines all the farm salmon collected 4 times a year by the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands (BCMAL) audits. Four times a year BCMAL inspectors go to 120 salmon farms and pick up a few of the freshly dead salmon and send them to Dr. Marty at the Abbotsford Animal Health Centre. While this type of sampling this is not a good statistical method, their thinking was that it would be most likely to reveal any new diseases.
We know from an email released during Dr. Miller’s testimony that Dr. Marty does not “believe” in Marine Anemia.
In exhibit 613G March 17, 2011, Cohen Commission we see Marine Anemia (Plasmacytoid Leukemia, also called Salmon Leukemia Virus, SLV) is one of the leading candidates in the search for the virus seen in the Genomic Profiles that appears to be killing and weakening the Fraser sockeye:
So, if a virus has infected the majority of Fraser sockeye, and the only public vet who looks at farm salmon does not believe in this virus, we know he is never going to diagnosis it. Therefore we need to know if the clinical signs of marine Anemia are being recorded in Dr. Marty’s reports? Are clinical signs of Marine Anemia in BCP002864?
You are not allowed to see this database. The reason given by your provincial government is that if they allowed this database to become public it might have a “chilling effect” on all disease reporting by all farms in BC, including pigs, chickens etc.
The point missed here is that farm salmon are in public waters. They use nets so that all their feces, mucus, scales, etc. will be carried out of their pens into public water, where wild fish are breathing these things in and passing them over their gills into direct contact with their bloodstream. We learned very quickly in the Avian flu outbreaks that contact with wild birds has the dangerous potential of spreading disease. But the provincial lawyer seems to want to ignore this and is saying that it is in your interest to keep farm salmon autopsy reports secret from you.
I took the salmon farms and the Provincial government to BC Supreme Court and won my case that the Province of BC had no constitutional right to be managing salmon in the ocean. It was determined that the water inside and outside the pens is the same ocean. No one in Canada is allowed to own a fish in the ocean, so by default the salmon farmers do not have clear ownership of salmon in marine net pens. So the Province is way out on a limb here, withholding data on a public fishery that they have no right to be managing.