Working collaboratively with California Aquaculture producers and with support and funding from the Antimicrobial Use and Stewardship (AUS) Program in the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), we recently completed a three year examining veterinary care and antimicrobial use in California aquaculture.
This project had three main objectives:
1) Conduct a literature review on the California aquaculture industry and its disease management strategies;
2) Develop and administer a survey of the California aquaculture industry to collect information about disease challenges and mitigation efforts;
3) Create educational resources pertaining to disease management and the use of antimicrobial products, such as antibiotics.
The literature review (Objective 1), Disease prevention and mitigation in US finfish aquaculture: A review of current approaches and new strategies was published in 2023 and is open access and can be found here.
The survey (Objective 2), was completed and a publication is currently in preparation. Data from the survey provided useful information for the CDFA AUS program and supported their efforts to better understand the use of antimicrobial products and disease risks of the commercial and natural resource agency aquaculture industry.
We also produced additional outreach products (Objective 3) associated with the project.
Two videos were published on our This Is Aquaculture YouTube channel around Seafood Safety and Biosecurity in Aquaculture Objective 3 resulted in the creation of a video posted on our and two informative posters.
We also produced two posters designed to illustrate the three levels of disease prevention in finfish aquaculture and to present the concept of antimicrobial product stewardship.
The disease prevention poster describes the importance of facility-wide protocols, good-husbandry strategies, and antimicrobial products for optimizing animal health and disease management practices while the antimicrobial stewardship poster includes a description of the global problem of antimicrobial resistance, the goals of antimicrobial stewardship, and practices for aquaculture producers to follow when using antimicrobial products. Posters were created in English and Spanish and can be downloaded below. We have also produced the "Tips for Reducing Disease in Aquaculture" poster using tilapia, sturgeon, catfish and bass. If you would like one of those other versions, please do not hesitate to contact us at aquaculture@ucdavis.edu
