The cage is located in its North West Cove site in Hermitage Bay off the south Newfoundland coast and is stocked with 47,000 fish, COS announced in a brief public advisory released Wednesday (Nov. 24).
“The company is taking all the responsible steps under the oversight of the Newfoundland and Labrador Department of Fisheries, Forestry and Agriculture [DFFA] and is following government-approved policies for reporting,” according to the statement.
Cooke spokesman Joel Richardson did not immediately return a request for comment.
ISA is a common, naturally-occurring ocean virus and not a human health or food safety issue, but it can be costly to harvesters.
Grieg Seafood of Norway was forced to cancel the transfer of almost 1 million Atlantic salmon from its smolt facility in Marystown, NL, to nearby net pens following a discovery of a single fish with a suspected case in August, Undercurrent News has reported .
Norwegian saln1on-farming giant Mowi suffered a significant mortality event in the Newfoundland and Labrador province in August 2020 when it discovered an outbreak of ISA at Cinq Island Cove, a 600,000 Atlantic salmon farm near the site of the earlier disaster. It reported losing 235,476 of its fish.
Cooke reported its own bout with ISA a month later at its Grip Cove site where seven cages were stocked with 485,000 salmon. Based on the DFFA records, it lost 55,690 of those fish.
In April of that year, Mowi was forced to cull 450,000 juvenile fish at the same hatchery after finding eight positive cases of a pathogenic strain of ISA and six with a non pathogenic strain, as reported by Undercurrent .
https://www.undercurrentnews.com/2021/11/24/cooke-subsidiary-finds-isa-virus-in-newfoundland-cage/